SEC Spent Nearly $4 Million Dollars on "Restacking Project"

According to an investigative report on CBSNews.com (link below), the SEC spent $3.9 million dollars in 2007 and 2008 reorganizing desks.

Instead of, you know, investigating swindlers like Bernard Madoff or cracking down on other frauds, the SEC decided to sink nearly $4 million dollars of their scant resources towards reorganizing the desks of 1,750 of their employees.

According to the report, the "Restacking Project" was undertaken in an effort to "enhance communication" between SEC employees.

The "Restacking Project", as it was called, relocated 1,750 employees over seven floors of the SEC headquarters.

A report was released by David Kotz, the Inspector General of the SEC, that claimed that employees of the SEC felt the reorganization was "not worth the cost or time".

The report further claims that a full 81% of the employees surveyed by Kotz felt that the reorganization was completely unnecessary.

Christopher Cox, chairman of the SEC at the time, apparently ordered a cost benefit analysis for the project that was never actually completed.

Instead of following up with whistle-blowers like Harry Markopoulos or investigating any number of Ponzi schemes that have surfaced over the past few years (usually when it's already too late to recover any significant sums of money), the upper management at the SEC decided that it was prudent to spend nearly $4 million dollars of taxpayer money on a re-organization of desks.

I'm far from being an expert on the matter, but spending almost $4 million dollars to move the desks of 1,750 people seems to be just a tad bit expensive.

That means that the SEC spent nearly $2400 per employee - isn't that an enormous sum of money to push a desk across an office and plug a computer into a wall?

Whatever happened to two workers just grabbing a desk and lugging it across the office? It can't be that complicated. Ok, you would have to move file cabinets and re-route phone lines as well - but $4 million dollars?!?

Just another example of wasteful spending by a government agency - nothing really surprises me anymore.

Source: SEC Spends Millions to Reorganize Desks

Filed under: Stock Market Scandals

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