It was reported on one of the news channels that Madoff's brother's daughter....otherwords, Madoff's neice is married to an attorney who is or used to be involved on the Commission: It was reported that she had a position with the Madoff business at an earlier time when the commission was being looked into ....but it was much later that they met again and a romance bloomed. It sounds like all actions on Madoff, until recently, were mostly superficial checking and accepting his own explanations to inquiry instead of looking at the books and following the money trails on a few random and non cherry picked leads.
This makes me wonder though..... just how much did the Commission hold Goldman Sachs' feet to the fire in their schemes and how was it a bailout was approved so quickly to help them?
It angers me that complaints are sometimes levied at small business firms, who are later vindicated of wrong doing by government regulation agencies, but only after they have to hire attorneys and extra and independant accountants at great expense to defend themselves against false allegations. (Well not every investigation proves to be false...... but I'm talking about the innocent ones here.) It is like a laziness exist on the part of these government agencies or protectionism..... it's hard to tell which and its sad to think the later is more apt to be true. Certainly it is easier to look at smaller businesses and accounts which are less complex, than look at complex and large investments and holdings which involve many transactions which may include some 'in-house' as well as external associations and involve complexities of verification.
The same thing occurred with the downfall of some major banks, where previous 'look sees' produced no alarm or public disclosures of dificiencies and their confidence level was unchallenged until a sudden and abrupt end. Perhaps the intent was not to alarm the public: But if suspicion existed and was substantiated in earlier investigations and published at an earlier time, the investing public would have been better informed and have confidence that these agencies are really looking out for our interest and exist to protect us from malfescence, rather than a shroud of protectionism in masquerade to protect business in fooling the people.
