Oops.

That was basically the explanation given by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York when a lawyer for one of the defendants in the criminal insider-trading case against Galleon Group's founder, Raj Rajaratnam said federal prosecutors sent the Securities and Exchange Commission confidential wiretap information.

For its part, officials at the SEC said they did not listen to anything contained on the 10 CDs containing the recordings, and that they returned them to the US attorney.

The CD exchange may have been inadvertent. However, keep in mind that the Southern District and the SEC have close ties and a long history of working together.

For one thing, as a matter of process, they frequently conduct parallel probes. In many cases, the US Attorney brings criminal charges while the SEC simultaneously files a civil lawsuit. Most times, they will celebrate how well the two agencies coordinated their efforts.

And these days it would not be surprising to see the two agencies working even closer together. For one thing, after the Madoff embarrassment, the SEC under its new chairman Mary Schapiro, new enforcement chief Robert Khuzami and New York head George Canellos, are publicly flexing their muscles to convince potential wrongdoers as well as investors that tougher sheriffs are patrolling the financial and corporate worlds.

In fact, shortly after joining the SEC, Khuzami announced a series of major structural changes, including delegating subpoena power to senior officers, precluding the need for the staff to obtain advance Commission approval.

"This means I can enter the order as well as senior colleagues if we need to get records from a hedge fund," Canellos told me back in the fall for an article published in Absolute Return-Alpha magazine. He also told me that as a former federal criminal prosecutor, it is a change he felt was long needed. "Twenty-five year-old criminal prosecutors can issue subpoenas," he said. "In my experience in the Department of Justice, we always had the possibility of a grand jury subpoena in our back pocket. So, the idea that you cannot get information is almost unfathomable."

And then there are the personal connections.

Khuzami, Canellos and Lorin L. Reisner, Deputy Director of Enforcement at the SEC at one time had worked together at the US Attorney's office in New York. The same office that "accidentally" forwarded the CD's.

The three individuals overlapped in 2004, Khuzami and Reisner overlapped for more than a year and Khuzami and Canellos overlapped for Canellos' entire tenure.

Canellos headed the major crimes unit-focusing on larger scale white collar crimes. Under Khuzami's supervision as Chief of the Office's Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force for three years, more than 100 individuals were arrested in an undercover sting operation, deemed to be the largest simultaneous arrest in a securities fraud case in Department of Justice history.

Meanwhile, earlier this week the SEC named Rhea Kemble Dignam Director of the SEC's Atlanta Regional Office. She has had a long and very distinguished career. It includes a 12-year stint in the early part of her career in the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York.

Perhaps, the SEC and US Attorney's office became a little too exuberant over their Galleon probes.