When Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox made an extraordinary apology for the agency having failed to follow up on clear evidence of wrongdoing by suspected financial fraudster Bernard Madoff, he excluded one key player from blame: himself.

In the public statement on Tuesday, Cox laid out a blistering attack on his staff, while appearing to exonerate himself from any responsibility.

He said the agency's most senior officials learned only a week ago that "credible and specific allegations regarding Mr. Madoff's financial wrongdoing, going back to at least 1999, were repeatedly brought to the attention of S.E.C. staff, but were never recommended to the Commission for action."

"I am gravely concerned," Cox added, "by the apparent multiple failures over at least a decade to thoroughly investigate these allegations or at any point to seek formal authority [from the commission] to pursue them."

Cox's decision to distance himself from the staffs' performance has rankled former senior S.E.C. officials who had nothing to do with the Madoff inquiries.

The S.E.C. is structured so that the chairman personally is in charge of the staff, these former agency officials said; he is in effect the agency's C.E.O., with division heads reporting directly to him, and he makes decisions about staff appointments and allocation of resources.

"He's the captain of the ship. The staff all work for him," said a former senior S.E.C. enforcement official, who worked in the commission's headquarters until a few years ago and had no involvement in any Madoff-related inquiry.

Jonathan Katz, former secretary to the commission who retired in January 2006, said that for a commission chairman to point the finger at his own staff while not taking blame himself was "unseemly."

An S.E.C. spokesman said that neither Cox nor the commission would have any comment on questions about Tuesday's statement.

Based on the information available so far, there is little doubt that the S.E.C. staff failed repeatedly by not pursuing aggressively the evidence handed to it.

It's also true, at least so far, that staff members never brought the evidence to the commissioners' attention—something enforcement investigators would have had to do to obtain a formal order of investigation and authority to issue subpoenas.

In that respect, Cox, who became chairman in late 2005, evidently didn't have any direct role in the S.E.C.'s disastrous failure to follow up.