Let’s talk about pornography.

Personally, I’d rather keep picking about the Securities and Exchange Commission’s fraud charges against Goldman Sachs, or the kabuki theater transpiring in the Senate this week before lawmakers go ahead and approve the regulatory reform bill everyone already knows will pass. But occasionally more interesting news crops up, and such was the case when yet another porn-on-the-job scandal emerged at the SEC late last week.

The broad contours of the scandal are pretty clear: Several dozen SEC staffers have been caught watching pornography at work, rather than doing more productive tasks like preventing the financial crisis.

One employee apparently circumvented porn-blocking filters simply by plugging a flash-drive into his computer. Another uploaded his own videos onto porn websites using his SEC-issued computer. Exploiting control failures to watch porn is ridiculous enough, but employees could also have exploited those failures to steal financial information, upload a virus into SEC systems, or commit other misconduct. That is what should worry people, starting with the five SEC commissioners.

Donna Boehme, a former chief compliance officer at British Petroleum and now head of Compliance Strategists Corp., put it best:

The SEC’s focus solely on financial compliance mirrors the same mistake that financial institutions have traditionally made. The result is a non-financial compliance problem that has a devastating impact on the organization’s reputation and license to operate. Having an empowered, senior compliance and ethics officer reporting directly to the top would have been one important step to detecting and addressing this risk before it reached the front pages of the news.

This article is available in fulle at Compliance Week.