http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/destruction-at-the-sec-09012011.html?chan=magazine+finance+channel_opening+remarks
The editors at Bloomberg BusinessWeek reviewed the story broken by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone regarding the routine, systematic destruction of documents at the Securities and Exchange Commission associated with dismissed MUI (Matters Under Investigation) and come to a similar, albeit far less colorful, conclusion:
Scrap it.
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Taibbi’s reporting effectively reinÂforces the idea that the agency is unsalvageable—and needs to be replaced. A new SEC would pay its top officials much higher salaries (in line with top private-sector attorneys) but not allow any of them to have previously worked on Wall Street or to go there for five years after they leave the agency. It would have genuine law-enforcement power, as opposed to the SEC’s referral or civil-suit-only mandate, and be able to indict a firm and its top executives for wrongdoing. In other words, the agency would have the chops to regulate a powerful industry badly in need of it, free of conflicts of interest.
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Imagine the reaction if the public learned that police departments in major cities across America had systematically destroyed evidence collected in unsolved murders over the past 20 years, making it impossible to identify and convict serial killers.
This is the white collar crime equivalent.
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