Nineteen civil servants were canned and over 200 more disciplined at the British Department of Work and Pensions, after reports that staffers there had seen so much Internet porn on the job the agency was being nicknamed the “Ministry of Porn.”
Some reports August 26 indicated DWP staffers accessed two million Net porn pages in the past year with one worker believed to have accessed 103,000 hardcore porn images. The British news media is calling the DWP on-the-job Net porn crackdown the largest of its kind by any British government agency.
"The DWP takes the misuse of its IT systems very seriously," an unnamed department spokeswoman was quoted as saying. "We regularly scan the computers to determine the presence of offensive or inappropriate material. Disciplinary action has been taken and it may lead to criminal prosecution."
The DWP probe reportedly began when one worker was merely caught looking at Internet porn at his desk, prompting the agency to begin probing their workers’ computer use in July 2003, continuing through March 2004.
The DWP is hardly the first British employer to have a problem with workers surfing the adult Internet on the job, though. Two years ago, Hewlett-Packard suspended over one hundred British and Irish staffers for using company e-mail to exchange porn.
