Whistle Blower Claims SEC Covered Up Wall Street Crimes - Rolling Stone

According to SEC attorney Darcy Flynn, who was responsible for helping to manage the commission's records, the SEC has been destroying records of preliminary investigations since at least 1993. Flynn alerted the National Archives and Records Administration, the agency in charge of maintaining the SEC's records about the practice. At that point, Flynn says, senior staff at the SEC scrambled to hide the commission's improprieties. In evidence he presented to the SEC's inspector general and three congressional committees earlier this summer, Flynn presented cases in which senior SEC officials thwarted investigations. In one case, according to Flynn, a director in the enforcement division accepted a job at bank the agency had been prevented from investigating by senior officials. In another case, the agency instructed a private law firm to investigate a company. The law firm had been hired by the company under investigation and concluded that no further investigation of its client was necessary. The SEC dropped the case and destroyed the files. Many of the files destroyed involved persons and companies who would later surface in the economic meltdown of 2008. Records relating to two investigations against Bernie Madoff and a 2002 inquiry into financial fraud at Lehman Brothers, as well as a 2009 preliminary investigation of insider trading at Goldman Sachs were deleted. The full article can be found here.