Five days ago, on December 1, I wrote:
The SEC is routinely criticized for not doing this, not doing that, not doing enough, and so on. Perhaps the agency could get more done if the people there would stop spending so much time investigating each other?
I wrote that after reading about two recent situations at the SEC where various "cat-and-mouse" games between the SEC's Inspector General, the SEC's employees, and the agency's General Counsel office seemed to be taking on a life of their own.
The day after I wrote that, December 2, Reuters reported on yet another vicious investigatory spiral going on at the agency. Two SEC employees who were the subjects of different investigations by SEC IG David Kotz have filed formal complaints against Kotz, alleging that Kotz "bullied" them, twisted facts, and retaliated against them.
One of the complainants, Linda Baier, acting branch chief of acquisition policy, says she and another staffer told Kotz that they felt one of his reports did not go far enough in investigating potential misconduct by an employee in their division. Baier and her colleague decided to go off and conduct their own investigation into the matter, and what they discovered led to that employee being disciplined by the SEC.
Baier says that shortly thereafter, Kotz started investigating her activities, and tried to get her disciplined based on a grammatical error she made in an e-mail that made it appear that she was improperly selecting contractors. Baier says that despite Kotz's recommendation that she be disciplined, her managers decided against that. "This was solely trumped up retaliation," she says.
So to recap this latest episode: An SEC employee disagreed with the results of an IG investigation of another employee; re-investigated the matter herself and got that employee disciplined; promptly became the subject of an investigation herself; and has now demanded that the IG be under investigation for his investigation of her.