 Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning. Thank you for inviting me here to testify before your committee today regarding my nine-year-long investigation into the Madoff Ponzi scheme. I would also like to recognize my congressman, Stephen Lynch, who is a member of the committee. I look forward to explaining to Congress today and the SEC's Inspector General tomorrow what I saw, when I saw it, and what my dealings with the SEC were that led me to this case being repeatedly ignored over an eight-and-a-half-year period between May 2000 and December 2008. First, I would like to extend my deepest sympathy to the many thousands of victims of this scheme. We know that many victims have lost their retirement savings and are too old to start over. We also know that others have lost medical services, community services, and scholarships provided by charities that were wiped out by the Madoff fraud. This pains me greatly, and I will do my best to inform you, the victims, about my repeated and detailed warnings to the SEC. You, above all others, deserve to know the truth about this agency's failings, and I will do my best to explain them to you today. You will hear me talk a great deal about over-loring at the SEC very soon. Let me say I have nothing against lawyers. In fact, I brought two of my own here today. As today's testimony will reveal, my team and I tried our best to get the SEC to investigate and shut down the Madoff Ponzi scheme with repeated, incredible warnings to the SEC that started in May 2000 when the Madoff Ponzi scheme was only a three to seven billion dollar fraud. We knew then that we had provided enough red flags and mathematical proofs to the SEC for them where they should have been able to shut him down right then and there at under $7 billion. But, unfortunately, the SEC staff lacks the financial expertise and is incapable of understanding the complex financial instruments being traded in the 21st century. In October 2001, when Madoff was still in the 12 to 20 billion dollar range, again, we felt confident that we had provided even more evidence to the SEC such that he should have been stopped at well under $20 billion. And again, in November 2005, when Mr. Madoff was at $30 billion, 29 red flags were handed to the SEC, and yet again, they failed to properly investigate and shut down Mr. Madoff's operation. Unfortunately, as they didn't respond to my written submissions in 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007, and 2008, here we are today. A fraud that should have been stopped at under $7 billion in 2000 has now grown to $50 billion. I know that you want to know why there were over $40 billion in additional damages, and I hope to be able to provide some of those answers to you today. Just as there is no I in team, I had a brave, highly trained team that assisted me throughout the nine-year Madoff investigation. Let me briefly introduce the key team members to you. Neil Cello, director of research for Benchmark Plus, a $1 billion plus fund of funds, checked every formula, every math calculation, and every modeling technique while also obtaining key financial statements and marketing documents from Madoff feeder funds. Mr. Cello also interviewed senior-level marketing staff and risk managers at these Madoff feeder funds. Frank Casey, North American president for London-based fortune asset management, a $5 billion hedge fund solutions advisory firm, closely tracked the Madoff feeder funds here and abroad, collected their marketing documents, and figured out Madoff's assets under management in his current cash situation. The final member of this four-person team was Michael Ochrant, recruited into the team by Mr. Casey. Mr. Ochrant was then an investigative reporter, institutional investor who made key contributions to the investigation. Mr. Ochrant was the only member of my team. Whoever met Mr. Madoff were stepped inside the Madoff operation. He conducted a key interview in April 2001. On May 1st, 2001, his publication, M.A.R. Hedge, printed Madoff Topps charts, skeptics ask how. It was an expose. It contained several red flags that the SEC ignored. These three gentlemen were my eyes and ears out into the hedge fund world, closely tracking who Madoff was dealing with and questioning the staff of the Madoff feeder funds to collect additional pieces of the puzzle. My Army Special Operations background trained me to build intelligence networks, collect reports from field operatives, devise lists of additional questions to fill in the blanks, analyze the data, and send draft reports for review and error correction to my team before submitting them to the SEC. In order to minimize the risk of discovery of our activities and a potential threat of harm to me, my team, and to our families, I submitted these reports to the SEC without signing them. Only a few key trusted people at the SEC knew my name and my name only, not of those of my team. In order to compartmentalize the damage, if Mr. Madoff found out that we were tracking him, Mr. Madoff was already facing life in prison if he were caught, so he faced little to no downside to removing whatever threat he felt we posed. At various points in time, throughout these past nine years, each of us feared for our lives. Each time any of us collected information, we took risks, and fortunately for us, we were not discovered. I'd also like to recognize Ed Manion of the Boston Regional Office of the SEC. He was my constant confidant throughout the past nine years. If not for his encouragement and bravery, I would have quit the investigation after my second submission, which was in October 2001. Mr. Manion told me that his agency had dropped the ball, but that I had a public duty to keep investigating because the Madoff Ponzi scheme was such a clear and present danger to the nation's capital markets that if the SEC wasn't going to investigate, well, someone had to, and he didn't think there was anybody better qualified than me to lead the investigation. Mr. Madoff kept taking the case to his superiors at the SEC, and he kept getting ignored because he was not a securities lawyer, only a chartered financial analyst with 25 years of trading and portfolio management experience in the industry. Sadly, the SEC distressed anyone with industry experience. I am very surprised that the SEC did not fire Mr. Manion for his constant pestering about Mr. Madoff. The SEC to this day holds against him the fact that he kept bringing this case to hit their attention, and I believe he would be fired if he ever went public and told investors how strong an advocate he was on their behalf. Boston branch chief Mike Gehry was the other SEC official who distinguished himself during the case. In October and November 2005, he examined my evidence, investigated and found irregularities, vouched for my credentials, and put me in touch with the appropriate SEC staff in the New York Regional Office. Since Mr. Madoff's operation was located in New York City, the New York Regional Office had jurisdiction. In 2000, Mr. Manion warned me that relations between the New York and Boston Regional Offices was about as warm and friendly as the Yankees Red Sox rivalry, and that New York does not like to receive tips from Boston. True words were never spoken. There was no centralized office of the whistleblower in Washington, staff with industry professionals who knew how to determine if whistleblower complaints being submitted were credible and a sufficient quality to merit immediate investigation. Instead, I had to go through the Boston SEC Regional Office, which had to forward me to the New York Regional Office. Unfortunately, these two offices did not get along, and I wasn't able to go directly to the SEC's headquarters in Washington and have them referee and lead this entire process. Regional turf battles definitely played a part, a determining factor in fact, in how disastrous this case was handled by the SEC. In April 2008, I went to the SEC's director of risk assessment with this case and got no response. I told the SEC exactly where to look, providing them with a long series of clear warnings that any trained investment professional would have immediately understood inexplicably. The SEC never acted upon those repeated and multiple warnings over a nine year time span. As my formal written testimony makes clear, the SEC is overlawered and has too few staff with relevant industry experience and professional credentials to find fraud, even when a multi-billion dollar case is handed to them on a silver platter. Worse, my team and I kept collecting additional information and I kept sending it to the SEC and they kept ignoring it. The SEC is also captive to the industry, it regulates, and it is afraid of bringing big cases against the largest, most powerful firms. Mr. Madoff was one of the most powerful men on Wall Street. He owned a prestigious brokerage firm. He and his brother held numerous top level positions on the most influential industry association boards. Clearly, the SEC was afraid of Mr. Madoff. The SEC says it lives for the big cases, but the evidence shows that only the financial regulators bringing the big cases in the 21st century are the New York Attorney's General's Office and the Massachusetts Security Division. New York and Massachusetts brought the big cases against the market timing scandals, the auction rate security scandals, while the SEC watched quietly from the sidelines. Even today, after Merrill Lynch paid out $6 billion in bonuses after losing untold tens of billions of dollars and is being propped up by government bailout money, only the New York Attorney General is investigating, the SEC continues to roar like a mouse and bite like a flea. But what I find the most disturbing about the Madoff case is that no one from the SEC has stepped forward to admit personal responsibility. Instead, all we've heard is one senior official after another saying that they cannot comment about the Madoff investigation because it is ongoing. We've also heard senior SEC officials bemoan the lack of both staff and resources while telling us that they receive thousands of tips each year and that they have to conduct triage and can only respond to the highest priority matters. I gift-wrapped and delivered the largest Ponzi scheme in history to them and somehow they couldn't be bothered to conduct a thorough and proper investigation because they were too busy on matters of higher priority. If a $50 billion Ponzi scheme doesn't make the SEC's priority list, then I want to know who sets their priorities. The Troubled Asset Relief Program was funded to the tune of $700 billion by the previous Congress. Therefore, I can think of 700 billion reasons why the American public deserves answers from the SEC about its refusal to tackle the big cases and why all FAIA-5 major investment Wall Street banks under SEC supervision either failed, were forced by the government to merge with commercial banks, or became bank holding companies propped up by the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury. When an entire industry that you were supposed to be regulating disappears due to unregulated, unchecked greed, then you are both a captive regulator and a failed regulator. You have no excuses, but you darn well have a lot of explaining to do to the American taxpayers, and you darn well better be apologizing to the man-off victims. The incoming SEC chairwoman needs to come in and clean house with a wide broom. The SEC needs new senior staff because the current staff has led our nation's financial system to the brink of collapse. They ignored the rating agency scandals. They allowed the investment banks to engage and package and sell toxic subrime securities to investors. They ignored auction rate securities and allowed these toxic securities to be sold to investors. They ignored mutual fund market timing until embarrassed by state regulators into acting, and they ignored the man-off Ponzi scheme. They haven't earned their paychecks and they need to be replaced. This concludes my oral testimony. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.