Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 20 May 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. John McDonnell:

Yes, we were satisfied that we had access to the bank's systems and their operations and the books and records to allow us to formulate our opinion. Two things I would say, in the context of their having a load of disparate systems, that's not unusual in the audit of a financial institution, or, indeed, any entity. Any entity would have a lot of different computer systems. The important thing is is that there are controls over how those computer systems talk to each other, and also there are controls over any manual interventions. So while it would be ideal to have one platform, you'll rarely see that platform; so it wasn't unusual that Bank of Ireland would have a disparate set of systems in their divisions, but what was important is they had appropriate controls over how those systems rolled up together. In the context of the Oliver Wyman report, the Oliver Wyman report was around credit governance, whereas, as I said, our role is solely on the focus on material misstatement in the financial statements, so, in that regard, our role was around the audit of impairment, and impairment is a small subset of the overall credit risk methodologies.

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