GOP ramps up attacks on SEC over porn surfing

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.

California Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House 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."

The SEC's inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo. It says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed.

SEC spokesman John Nester said in a statement Friday that each of the offending employees has been disciplined or is in the process of being disciplined, and some have already been suspended or dismissed.

"We will not tolerate the transgressions of the very few who bring discredit to their thousands of hardworking colleagues," said Nester, adding the agency has lately increased penalties.

The memo was written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz in response to a request from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). 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. 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.