Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 20 May 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Dargan Fitzgerald:

Certainly, thank you. So, as a general matter, the teams are - which carry out the audits - are, we call them multidisciplinary teams. The key disciplines involved are core auditors, but also tax specialists and information technology specialists, being the two other specialisms that are typically brought in, and I'll come back to the matter of property valuations in just a moment. So, the two years that I was involved in, I think I mentioned previously that, the team was considerably larger in the 2008 year than in the 2007 year. The reason for that is the increased focus and increased ... we had on the lending portfolio and the question of impairment, based on our risk assessment. In that context, we expanded the team, as I say, from the 2007 team.

Just to give you some contextual background to that, the total numbers involved in the audit team would have been in the region of 30, from memory, in 2007, and 40 in 2008, with a corresponding increase in the audit hours. I should also mention that in 2008 the ... because of our general understanding of the presence of risk within the financial system, we made a designation of the audit which we call "close monitoring", which means we heighten its risk in terms of our register of the risk of the potential misstatement in relation to the audit. So I was assisted by what's called an independent partner, who acts as a sounding board and a peer reviewer of any key decisions that I make. There are other partners involved in the team, such as a tax partner and an information technology partner, and then, as you can imagine, the balance of the team of some 40, from memory in 2008, is made up of directors, managers, senior managers and core staff, coming from those various disciplines.

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