Note to self: What the hell planet do you think you're on?

Greed is an amazing thing. Just step over the bodies and keep going...

...when [her] salary depends on her not understanding it.”

Annette Bongiorno, 66, was sentenced in Manhattan by U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who said she believed Bongiorno's testimony at trial that she was largely duped by Madoff into manufacturing fake trade results for his private investment business.

She called her "a pampered, compliant and grossly overcompensated clerical worker who supervised other clerical workers with a ferocious enthusiasm."

The judge said Bongiorno "could and should have recognized that Mr. Madoff's success seemed impossible because it was impossible."

Swain added: "Ms. Bongiorno chose to put her life and the life of others in the wrong hands."

Seven employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission have been disciplined, but no one has been fired, after investigations into how the agency failed to stop Bernard Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme despite repeated warnings that he was stealing billions of dollars from investors, The Washington Post reports.

An SEC spokesman, John Nester, tells the Post that the agency considered "all factors relevant to the imposition of discipline, including the employees' performance before and since the Madoff events." The most severe punishment: one person got "a 30-day suspension without pay and a reduction in pay," the Post says.

As Morning Edition reported in March 2010, Harry Markopolos "a financial analyst-turned-investigator who spent nearly a decade on Madoff's trail," warned the SEC repeatedly about what what was happening and was "largely ignored."

Indeed the SEC's Office of Investigations reported that the SEC "received more than ample information in the form of detailed and substantive complaints [from Markopolos and others] over the years to warrant a thorough and comprehensive examination and/or investigation of Bernard Madoff and BMIS for operating a Ponzi scheme, and that despite three examinations and two investigations being conducted, a thorough and competent investigation or examination was never performed."

...while the SEC people don't even so much as lose their jobs.

and no one would listen to him for a decade. HE should be running the SEC. Dude knows how to get to the bottom line of this kind of fraud.

Markopolos later said that he knew within five minutes that Madoff's numbers didn't add up. It took him another four hours to mathematically prove that they could have only been obtained by fraud

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Markopolos

I was mesmerized by is interview on "The World Show". Went out and got his book. About two hundred pages that unfortunately repeated itself:

- develop a theory on Madoff
- collect data to support theory
- summarize data into report
- submit report to SEC
- ignored by SEC
- repeat

Had a chance to hear him speak and shake his hand last year.

On edit: he names names within the SEC, and not afraid to call them out as incompetent. Willing to bet nothing happened to them.

and I never got around to it. Thanks for the reminder!

The idea that this woman wasn't knee deep in it is preposterous. She ran the day-to-day fraud operation herself.