The commission's inspector general, H. David Kotz, is conducting a review of more than a million emails from 27 SEC employees. The goal? To get to the bottom of how the securities regulator missed out on the Bernard Madoff fraud despite several close looks in recent years. The review was ordered by outgoing SEC chairman Chris Cox.

Kotz's office has also conducted interviews of several dozen witness and contracted with an outside forensic accounting firm to review previous reports from the SEC's Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, which inspected Madoff's firm as many as seven times in the last decade. The Inspector General's findings are expected in August. Stay tuned.

-- MDT

Labels: Bernie Madoff, Christopher Cox, David Kotz