They weren't doing their job already but this administration wants to give them
more power...  Typical.  They just make this stuff too easy...

=========================================


http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/04/23/republicans-slam-sec-porn-surfing-re
port/


Republicans Slam SEC Over Porn Surfing Report

Associated Press

Senior agency staffers spent hours surfing pornographic websites on
government-issued computers while they were supposed to be policing the
nation's financial system.

WASHINGTON -- Republicans are stepping up their criticism of the Securities and
Exchange Commission following reports that senior agency staffers spent hours
surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were
supposed to be policing the nation's financial system.

Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House of Representatives Oversight
and Government Reform Committee, said it was "disturbing that high-ranking
officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking
action to help stave off the events that put our nation's economy on the brink
of collapse."

He said in a statement late Thursday that SEC officials "were preoccupied with
other distractions" when they should have been overseeing the growing problems
in the financial system.

The SEC's inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at
explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained by The
Associated Press.

The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the
financial system teetered and nearly crashed.

The staffers' behavior violated government-wide ethics rules, it says.

The memo provides fresh ammunition for Republicans who suspect the timing of
the SEC's lawsuit last week against Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs Group
Inc. News of the suit came as the Senate prepared to take up a sweeping
overhaul of the rules governing banks and other financial companies.

The memo was written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz in response to a
request from Republican Sen. Charles Grassley. It summarizes past inspector
general probes and reports some shocking findings:

-- 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.

An SEC spokesman declined to comment Thursday night.

About 16 percent of men with Internet access at work admit to looking at online
porn while at the office, according to a 2006 survey by Websense Inc.

Former SEC spokesman Michael Robinson said he shares the public's outrage about
SEC staffers who enjoyed porn on the taxpayers' expense when they were supposed
to be keeping the markets safe.

"That kind of behavior is just intolerable and atrocious," said
Robinson, now
with Levick Strategic Communications. He said he expects the head of the SEC,
Mary Schapiro and her team, are "very focused on" the issue.

Schapiro has been parrying Republican complaints about the Goldman Sachs
lawsuit, which agency officials hoped would mark a new era of tougher oversight
of Wall Street. They followed high-profile embarrassments including the failure
to catch pyramid scheme kings Bernard Madoff and R. Allen Stanford.

Republican lawmakers also accused the SEC of being influenced by politics. The
SEC's commissioners approved the Goldman charges on a rare 3-2 vote. The two
who objected were Republicans.

Schapiro is a registered independent who has been appointed by presidents of
both parties.

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