A recent article in the Washington Times shares the startling information about the ridiculous amount of tax dollars that are wasted on government employees accessing porn at work. The agency inspector of the National Science Foundation (NSF) had to shift his primary focus from grant fraud to finding out who is using government computers to search for porn.
- One senior executive spent at least 331 days looking at pornography and chatting online with partially clad or nude women (his “humanitarian” defense was that he frequented the porn sites to provide a living to the poor overseas women). This cost tax payers anywhere from $13,800 to $58,000.
- One worker perused hundreds of pornographic Web sites during work hours in a three week time frame in June 2008. That employee received a 10-day suspension.
- Another employee was caught with hundreds of pictures, videos and even PowerPoint slide shows containing pornography.
- Another employee stored nude images of herself on her computer.
- In 2007, there were seven employee misconduct investigations closed by the inspector general. In 2008, there were 10 investigations, and seven involved online pornography.
- Deputy Inspector General Tim Cross said, “We were consumed with a lot of these cases.”
- Overall, investigative recoveries totaled more than $2 million for the year.
- The names of all of the employees targeted in the pornography cases were redacted from the more than 120 pages of investigative documents released to The Times.
For more information about this problem in America in general, read Michael Leahy’s new book, Porn @ Work: Exposing the Office’s #1 Addiction.
