It has come to light that many top staff members at the federal government’s very important Securities and Exchange Commission spent countless hours browsing pornographic Web sites on government-issued computers, and on government time.
That is bad enough.
But it is especially infuriating that much of this abuse of taxpayers came during the very time in the past few years when our nation was entering a deep recession, brought on in part by unwise practices at some financial companies. Those practices might have been spotted sooner if so many SEC workers had not been devoting much of their time to pornography instead of to their watchdog role.
A report on the SEC scandal found, among other violations, that one top lawyer at the agency sometimes whiled away eight hours per day viewing or downloading porn. When space on his computer was all used up, he started using computer disks to store even more porn. The disks were in boxes scattered around his office. He has since resigned.
But an accountant got only a 14-day suspension after it was found that in just one month a computer filter had blocked him from going to sex-related sites 16,000 times. He continues to collect a paycheck courtesy of taxpayers. Does that give you confidence that Washington is serious about cracking down on this behavior?
Meanwhile, 17 of the government workers involved in the scandal were getting pay of up to $222,000 per year. Their actions would still be wrong even if their pay were much lower, of course. But it is appalling that taxpayers were on the hook for such large salaries for people who spent their working hours viewing porn.
Congress is considering legislation to overhaul the regulation of banks and other financial companies. But with the federal government taking a lax approach to disciplining SEC workers involved in the porn scandal, we wonder whether the new rules will be enforced more effectively than the old ones were.