A reminder of how things work within the SEC.
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Details emerge from a private lawsuit.
Employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission caught in a porn scandal were on huge six-figure salaries, it has emerged today.
Seventeen of the workers were earning between $99,356 and $222,000 a year.
They were among 33 investigated for downloading pornography on their SEC computers at SEVEN offices around the country.
They were 'counselled and disciplined for accessing pornography', but not one was sacked, according to the lawyer who exposed their behaviour.
The men worked in Denver, Atlanta, Boston; Chicago, Fort Worth, Texas, Los Angeles and Washington.
Last year the Office of Inspector General's investigation revealed between 2005-2010 that:
- A senior attorney admitted downloaded pornographic images to his SEC computer during work hours so frequently that, on some days, he spent eight hours accessing online pornography.
He downloaded so much pornography that he exhausted the available space on the hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office.
- A regional office staff accountant received more than 16,000 access denials for Internet websites classified by the Commission's Internet filter as either 'sex' or 'pornography' in a one-month period.
'But, as a taxpayer, when somebody's … supposed to be out there protecting us from fraud, etc, and instead what they're doing is wasting our taxpayer dollars, sitting there pleasuring themselves that really upsets me.'
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More detail...
The SEC's response to Evan's FOIA letter