Computer users at the U.S. Department of the Interior rack up an estimated 104,221 hours of lost productivity in a year surfing online auction and gaming sites, and even more time spent on gambling and pornography web sites, according to an inspector general’s audit released last week.

The report itself was so popular inside the department that it resulted in significant slowdowns on the server hosting the report as Department employees downloaded and read the report, not getting much actual work done.

“We discovered that computer users at the Department have continued to access sexually explicit and gambling websites due to the lack of consistency in Department controls over Internet use,” the report (PDF) said.

The audit found that while controls had been established in some bureaus to block access to inappropriate Web sites, the controls were not consistent across the Department due to bureaucratic resistance, and found evidence that when controls were in place, some users were actively circumventing them in order to gain access to gambling and sexually explicit Web sites.

Using access logs for one week of activity, auditors found that thousands of DOI employees routinely goof off at work, spending as much as 14 hours a week playing online games, or an hour browsing pornography, or worse. “Pornography, and in some cases child pornography, have been discovered during forensic examinations of Department computers,” the report said. “Often, the discovery of pornography is incidental to the purpose of the forensic examination.” Typically, the bureaucrat catches viruses from the malicious Web sites they visit and the pornography is found when technicians try to clean out the infection.

Auditors found that employees are almost never disciplined for inappropriate Internet usage, finding usage policies inconsistent across the Department and that bureaus in the Department do not monitor log files to look for prohibited activities. So bureaucrats easily get away with it. “Bureau officials reported there have been only 177 disciplinary actions imposed on DOI computer users for inappropriate Internet use since 1999,” the report said. “We discovered that 112 of the 177 (63%) disciplinary actions were for accessing pornographic or sexually explicit websites.”

But during just the week that the auditors sampled, at least 443 employees accessed sexually explicit Web sites.

Doesn’t it make you feel good to know that your tax money is going to such needful things?