Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 13 May 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. Gerry Fitzpatrick:
By ... group internal audit. This is a reflection of what was happened. Group internal audit had done reviews on this. We had talked to group internal audit about that. I'm not entirely sure this was, how this was identified but it was partly self-identified. So this was an issue that we were aware of. The question was how the bank was mitigating a risk like that and therefore, I think that when you say, I don't know what your phrase was, ''the boom was over'', this is a process issue. This is, the loans are given after we come to review them and to test them.
So the question is, can you properly capture the risk associated with the lending and properly reflect it in the financial statements? So whether the boom or whatever it was was over or not, this was an issue that I needed to address and there are many other pages in our audit report where the multiple steps in provisioning and underwriting loans would have been looked at. This would have been something that we would have being trying to see and as I say, this is one paper out of hundreds and therefore I think this shows us the kind of understanding of the systems that we were doing and we would have looked for a mitigating control to say, could this cause a material error in the financial statements to be misreported?
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