Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will go to something else that is unrelated to the Bill but connected in a way when we are talking about holding individuals to account. We welcome the provisions to hold individuals accountable. However, there is a gap in the toolbox for the Central Bank to be able to operate. In many circumstances, particularly those that are most public and most damaging, issues have been identified after the fact, in some cases by consumers who brought forward issues to the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman, for example, regarding the tracker mortgage scandal. It is worth considering the merits of an incentivised whistleblowing regime within financial institutions. Just in the past couple of weeks the Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, paid out $10 million to a whistleblower in America. This is normal practice for the SEC, flowing from legislation introduced there many years ago, known as the Dodd-Frank Act, which encourages or incentivises whistleblowing within financial institutions. Where a prosecution flows from the information that is provided, the individual can receive anything up to 30% of the fine that is levied. Crucially, the money provided by the SEC is not money that normally would have gone to investors or consumers, and there is a fund for these penalties that encourages and incentivises this.

There is provision in this legislation relating to individuals coming forward in respect of immunity and so on, but I want to hear the Minister's view. It is important that we have the tools to hold individuals to account but we need to have the information. We have an important financial services sector in Ireland but it is also small in terms of its footprint and its personnel, particularly at the higher level, and I think this would be another deterrent. That is what this Bill is about. We hope it is a deterrent to bad practice. We hope that people will understand it is no longer the company but the individual who will be held accountable, and people may think twice or thrice before they involve themselves in activity that is inappropriate. Knowing that somebody may provide information to the Central Bank and may be financially rewarded as a result of doing so, in certain circumstances, would also be a serious discouragement to some of the activity we have seen in the past.