SEC staffers watched porn as economy crashed

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.

He said in a statement Thursday that SEC officials were preoccupied with other distractions when they should have been overseeing the growing problems in the financial system.

The SEC\'s inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.

The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed.