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YOUNG, inexperienced government regulators were so wowed by Bernard Madoff‘s ritzy Midtown headquarters that they asked about job openings and dropped off resumes while missing clear evidence he was running a massive Ponzi scheme, a new book claims.

“No wonder they never found anything,” Madoff firm secretary Elaine Solomon told author Andrew Kirtzman for his book, “Betrayal: The Life and Lies of Bernie Madoff,” The Post’s Dan Mangan reports.

In the book out today, Solomon, speaking out for the first time since Madoff’s epic downfall last winter after years of operating his multibillion-dollar scam, said the arch-fraudster got anxious every time investigators from the Securities and Exchange Commission came knocking at his Third Avenue office in the Lipstick Building.

“But he needn’t have worried,” Kirtzman writes. “He and his aides were amazed at the youth and experience of the regulators who showed up at their door.”

Solomon said, “They would walk in and we’d look at them and we’d say to each other, ‘What do you think their combined age is, 12?’

“They’d send kids. I think it was their first job out of school,” said Solomon, who worked for Madoff’s younger brother, Peter, and who did not know anything about the fraud when it was going on.

“The youthful SEC staffers were so dazzled to be at Madoff headquarters that they occasionally inquired about job openings at the company,” Kirtzman writes.

Solomon said, “They would say, ‘Can we get jobs — can we give you our resumes?’ We’d say, ‘Send them through to our offices. A couple of them dropped resumes off.’ ”

When SEC probers showed up at Madoff’s office after his arrest to begin going through paperwork to trace his fraud’s tentacles, Solomon recognized one of them from a prior visit years ago.

“If you had done your [bleep]ing job in the first place, we wouldn’t be in this position now!” Solomon yelled at him.