(Bloomberg) -- Two US senators criticized the Federal Reserve’s internal watchdog for his investigation into trading by Fed officials during the pandemic, saying he failed to hold agency officials accountable or take steps to prevent similar scandals in the future.

Mark Bialek, the Fed’s inspector general, cleared two former policymakers of legal wrongdoing in January following a years-long probe of their personal trading activity in 2020, a time when the central bank was intervening in financial markets. Former Fed presidents Robert Kaplan of Dallas and Eric Rosengren of Boston resigned after the trading became public.

Senators Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, said in a letter Wednesday that the IG failed to complete the investigation in a timely way or address ongoing weaknesses in the Fed’s ethics rules.

“The aftermath of this scandal is an ongoing example of why the inherent conflict of interest in your position – in which you are charged with holding Fed officials accountable, but are hired by those same officials and serve at their pleasure – prevent you from being an effective watchdog,” the senators wrote in a March 6 letter to Bialek.

A spokesperson for the inspector general’s office said they had received the letter and were reviewing it.

Warren and Scott introduced a bill last year that would require the Fed IG to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, which they said would ensure his independence.

Under Chair Jerome Powell, the Fed has revamped its rules around trading to prohibit officials involved with monetary policy decisions from purchasing individual stocks or sector funds, or holding investments in individual bonds or agency securities, among other guidelines. The rules were expanded to apply to more senior Fed staffers following the inspector general’s report in January.

But the IG told Warren and Scott’s office that, although the Fed promised to implement two of six recommendations to strengthen its ethics rules last year, “the matters all remain ‘open,’” according to the letter.

(Adds comment from inspector general’s office in fifth paragraph.)

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