A. Wolak compared the financial services and nuclear industries. While acknowledging both are susceptible in principle to regulatory capture, they concluded regulatory failure – including through regulatory capture – has been much more of a problem in the financial industry and even suggested the financial industry create an analog to the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations to reduce regulatory risk. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has strongly opposed the efforts of the 50 state attorneys general, who have banded together to penalize banks and reform the mortgage modification process, following the subprime mortgage crisis and the financial crisis of 2008. This example was cited in The New York Times as evidence that the OCC is "a captive of the banks it is supposed to regulate". Securities and Exchange Commission The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has also been accused of acting in the interests of Wall Street banks and hedge funds and of dragging its feet or refusing to investigate cases or bring charges for fraud and insider trading. Financial analyst Harry Markopolos, who spent ten years trying to get the SEC to investigate Bernie Madoff, called the agency "nonfunctional, captive to the industry". Similarly in the case of the Allen Stanford Ponzi scheme, there were repeated warnings of fraud from both inside and outside the SEC for more than a decade. But the agency did not stop the fraud until 2009, after the Madoff scandal became public in 2008. The SEC has been found by the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, the Senate Judiciary Committee and a federal district court to have illegally dismissed an employee in September 2005 who was critical of superiors' refusal to pursue Wall Street titan John Mack. Mack was suspected of giving insider information to Arthur J. Samberg, head of Pequot Capital Management, once one of the world's largest hedge funds. After more than four years of legal battles, former SEC investigator Gary J. Aguirre filed papers in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case he had against the SEC, seeking an order to force the SEC to turn over Pequot investigation records to him on the grounds that they had not charged anyone. Aguirre had already provided incriminating evidence of Pequot's insider trading involving Microsoft trades to the SEC in a letter on January 2, 2009. The morning after Aguirre's