The SEC accused dev of fraud for behaving like a dev

Well, probably not. From the actual OIG summary report (which was not written defensively in response to articles like this, but is rather the source material from which these articles draw):

The employee in question --- an employee of the SEC, in case you thought this was an instance of the SEC telling other companies what to do:

    (1) committed time and attendance fraud; (2) terminated
    an employee for asking questions during an
    SEC examination of a registrant and for voicing an
    opinion; and (3) unnecessarily requested proprietary
    trading code from registrants and downloaded this
    proprietary training code onto a personal computer.

And, further:

    (1) was untruthful with the
    subject’s supervisor and the OIG about the nature
    of foreign travel; (2) misrepresented commuting
    costs when applying for transit benefits and received
    about $400 in transportation subsidies that the
    subject was not entitled to receive; and (3) did not
    properly clear the sale of a security in accordance
    with the SEC’s supplemental ethics rules.

Some of these claims were substantiated (for instance: the investigation, prompted by complaints from coworkers that this employee was never showing up to work, determined that the developer had missed 150 days of work), and other not (no evidence was found that they'd improperly obtained private trading code).

But either way: Quartz's summary of this story is needlessly glib, and the story itself doesn't seem all that interesting. I have no idea whether the employee was properly terminated or not (Quartz did them no favors by outing them in the article!), but I'm not sure why I would care either way.