— A senior attorney at the SEC’s Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.

— An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as “Sex” or “Pornography.” Yet, he still managed to amass a collection of “very graphic” material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC’s internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense and received a 14-day suspension.

— Seventeen of the employees were “at a senior level,” earning salaries of up to $222,418.

— The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008. The cracks in the financial system emerged in mid-2007 and spread into full-blown panic by the fall of 2008.
Uh, the fuck? That sounds more severe than me in teenage years.

One S.E.C. employee went so far as to start his own private pornography business using S.E.C. resources, ‘including Commission Internet access, e-mail, telephone and printer’ … the results of those investigations were routinely reported to Congress, and they’ve been publicly available all this time on the inspector general’s Web site.”
from NYT.