The people whose job it was to do so were too busy consuming copious amounts of porn:
David Ito is an assistant regional director in the SEC’s Los Angeles office. He makes around $200,000 a year supervising the commission’s L.A. regulators. According to a source, he was looking at porn at work during the economic collapse.
Ito, according to an SEC insider, is the SEC supervisor at the center of a redacted inspector general report into “misuse of government computer resources and official time” late last year in which he admitted to attempting to view sites like www.fuck-my-wife.com and analsins.com from his Los Angeles office more than 1,800 times over a 17-day period. Though the inspector general’s report called Ito’s porn obsession a “serious matter” that “could have discredited the SEC” and recommended “disciplinary action up to and including dismissal,” the insider says Ito still has his job and hasn’t been disciplined in any outwardly evident way. In fact, Ito has held on to the promotion he received just before the investigation into his workplace porn habits began.
Of course, there’s always the Michael Lewis theory, which holds that no one on Wall Street or in government knew a damn thing about how credit default swaps worked.