This is the kind of nightmare that all taxpayers have about their governments and it's come true for voters in Japan. A bureaucrat who works in the construction division of a place called Kinokawa City in the western part of the country has been suspended from his job after authorities discovered what he did all day - stared at porn websites when he should have been working.

Officials finally caught up to the unnamed 57-year-old employee, who his bosses say would expend more energy on his porn interests than his business ones. City spokesperson Kazuhiko Ueyama insists the employee gazed at the illicit images on his office computer for at least three hours a day every day for eight months, beginning in June 2007

What finally tipped them off? When IT experts began having to repeatedly remove the same virus from the worker's PC beginning last February, they became suspicious. So they began monitoring the source of the infection and discovered it came from the porn sites he was visiting. 

"These were foreign 'adult sites' and they got through the security net," Ueyama explains of the barrier the government had set up to prevent such goings on. "The man apologized each time we spoke to him, but we couldn't quite get him to explain to us why he did this."

He's since been suspended and demoted but now that the story is public, that may not be enough. Angry taxpayers have been besieging the local government with phone calls for the employee's head. They want him fired and feel that in this case, the punishment definitely doesn't fit the crime.

So far, there's no indication that pressure from the public will work, apparently proving that old adage about how hard it is for a bureaucrat to actually lose his job. Especially if he's doing the city's 'dirty' work.