Six fold increase in porn surfing at federal agency

Washington, Sep 29 (ANI): A six fold increase in employee misconduct investigations, particularly involving workers accessing pornography from their government computers, has been observed at the National Science Foundation (NSF), a taxpayer-funded foundation in the US that doles out billions of dollars of scientific research grants.

Budget documents and other records reveal that the pervasive problems at NSF have even swamped the agency's inspector general.

Thus, the internal watchdog was forced to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud, and recovering misspent tax dollars.

"To manage this dramatic increase without an increase in staff required us to significantly reduce our efforts to investigate grant fraud," the Washington Times quoted the inspector general as having told Congress in a budget request recently.

"We anticipate a significant decline in investigative recoveries and prosecutions in coming years as a direct result," he added.

The budget request did not reveal the nature or number of the misconduct cases.

However, the records obtained by the daily through the Freedom of Information Act disclosed the extent of the well-publicized porn problem inside the government-backed foundation.

For instance, the records showed that one senior executive spent at least 331 days looking at pornography on his government computer and chatting online with nude or partially clad women without being detected.

And after being caught, he retired and even offered, among other explanations, a humanitarian defence, suggesting that he frequented the porn sites to provide a living to the poor overseas women.

"He explained that these young women are from poor countries and need to make money to help their parents and this site helps them do that," investigators wrote in a memo.

Recent budget documents for the inspector general cite a "6-fold increase in employee misconduct cases and associated proactive management implication report activities."

The document did not reveal how many cases were involved in the increase, and officials could not immediately provide a figure. (ANI)