Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 29 April 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. David Duffy:

Okay, maybe, Deputy, if I could deal with those in reverse order. In 30 years, it only gives me four periods ... seven years, but I have been through a few crises and I can tell you that a crisis usually generates chaos in an institution and the ability to access and find documents and other parts of history usually get very confused. So there is always a chaos around documentation, the degrees vary significantly, obviously depending on the institution. That being said, it was a material concern for us in terms of the absolute level and back when I joined the bank, there were in the ... probably thousands, quite a few thousand, that were, you know, were really just not in our possession or at the level of satisfaction that we would like to have in our possession. And, it has taken at least three years, to the first part of your question, to materially resolve that issue. We still have some outstanding issues but we have an agreement in process to try and resolve those and that's going well. But, nonetheless, a very unsatisfactory issue for an extended period of time. A little bit ... the cause of it tended to be a disaggregated model where everybody was originating locally and storing their documents locally and it was in a file or in a drawer ... somebody said, "I'll get that to you next week", and it was never followed up. Typical of a one-way traffic, high-volume type environment, without discipline and process.

Now with regard to losses, I couldn't tell you what the accumulative number is - I haven't looked at that - but it has not been a major issue for the bank. It has been an issue case by case, but cumulatively not, I don't think, a material one.

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