SEC Charges Eleven in Stock Manipulation Ring

[jurisper]

Or it could have just been the time needed for SEC IT guys to get around to reading the disks and for their attorneys to build some document boxes and order replacement toner for the photocopier and puzzle out how the case management system is supposed to work etc etc etc etc etc.

I suppose this only came on relatively quickly because other enforcement agencies with working photocopiers etc were involved.

http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/wapo_circles_back_on_coxs_sec.php

Investigative attorneys with whom we spoke concurred that having little or no administrative or paralegal support causes them to spend considerable time on non-legal duties such as copying, filing, document-scanning, preparing exhibits, making travel arrangements, soliciting bids for court reporters, and logging and processing documents submitted by respondents. For example, one attorney told us such duties can take 2 to 3 hours daily. Another, who joined the agency from private practice, said that investigative attorneys can spend up to half their time on tasks handled by support staff in their previous position. One attorney told us of plans to spend a day assembling document storage boxes. Because there is insufficient in-house copying capability, confidential documents sometimes are sent to non-secure outside copy shops. Frequent equipment breakdowns mean attorneys must search for working copiers and scanners, a number of attorneys told us…

Once all those internal memos are completed, they have almost no value internally because the system is run on a proprietary case tracking system called CATS that is incompatible with all their other computer systems (which are all incompatible with one another) and which no one bothers to update or fix when it’s broken, both because their old information technology contractors no longer work there and because it is, in the staffers’ own words, “severely limited and virtually unusable.”


While downloading of information from computer hard drives has become a basic evidentiary technique, some investigative attorneys told us there can be lengthy delays for information technology support staff to retrieve the contents from hard drives obtained during an investigation. For example, one attorney told us about a case in active litigation in which Enforcement had to seek an extension of time for discovery because after 6 months, only two of a number of hard drives had been downloaded…

Several attorneys said that another significant shortcoming is that the investigative staff does not have access to real-time trading information… Currently, when attorneys need such information, they manually query hundreds of broker-dealers, a process that initially produces only incomplete records.