SEC employees make trades, view porn on the job?
Posted
Dec 01 2008, 01:32 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
The Securities and Exchange Commission, which busts people regularly for insider trading, may have an insider problem of its own.
Two employees sent numerous e-mails from SEC computers about stock trades. Now, the commission is investigating whether they broke rules or accessed SEC information while they were making a high volume of trades.
Commission employees have also been investigated for viewing porn from SEC computers and running side businesses on the job. One employee used SEC computers, phones and printers to run his private photography business.
The bad behavior was listed in the SEC's semi-annual report to Congress, which is online at Footnoted's site here.
The news elicited a bit of crowing from Mark Cuban, whom the SEC has charged with insider trading:
It never crossed my mind that it would be legal for employees of the SEC to trade stocks. Not that they shouldn’t have rights to own whatever they want in a trust. They should. Trading individual stocks and bonds. Wow.
But, as Cuban notes, the SEC deserves credit for looking critically at itself -- and going public with its findings. Every government agency should be doing the same thing.
