Another Fine for Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley (MS) keeps racking up regulatory fines stemming from sloppy management and oversight of its huge staff.

The big Wall Street firm is paying $10 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle allegations that it failed to maintain and enforce procedures to prevent employees from misusing nonpublic information.

"Morgan Stanley failed to conduct any surveillance of a massive number of employee accounts held at the firm and trading in certain securities in those and other accounts,'' says the settlement announcement.

The SEC specifically alleges that Morgan Stanley had no system in place for making sure that its employees were not engaging in improper insider trading for their personal benefit. The regulators say only recently has Morgan Stanley begun instituting a system to monitor trading by its employees.

Last month the SEC ordered Morgan Stanley pay a $15 million fine to settle allegations that the investment firm had repeatedly failed to turn internal emails requested by regulators. In that matter, the SEC charged Morgan Stanley failed to produce "tens of thousands of emails'' that were repeatedly demanded by regulators over a five-year period, beginning in 2000. The SEC said the firm's actions "compromised'' the two investigations.