While the US economy was going into a tail spin last year the Securities and Exchange Commission were too busy watching porn to notice. According to files made public, naughty websites were visited by high ranking officials within the SEC.

Apparently most of them were spending more time looking at the graphic material online than taking action to help the nation's economy. The inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years. SEC does allow employees to go online to conduct research, but it did not allow them to see porn. Some senior management employees were spending approximately eight hours a day viewing “inappropriate online material”.

One senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading inappropriate content. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. When his surfing habits were noticed he agreed to resign and is no longer employed at the agency.

An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting graphic websites. Yet he managed to amass a collection of "very graphic" material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC's internal filter.