Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 13 May 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. Patrick Davitt:
Yes. The sanctions that are available are you can put somebody out of the institute, you can put them out for a short time, or you can fine them. Now, we didn't have the fine at the particular time. We've only changed our articles of memorandum and articles in 2013, where we put the fining into it, because we found that with members, you either had to put them out of the institute altogether, or suspend them for a short term which could be up to two years, and that's really all we had. So we've changed that round about to make sure that we have other punishments as well that we could do, if you want to take it like that, and financial ... from a financial point of view.
The third question is the notes ... valuers would have notes, valuer's notes on every valuation. So when you go to look at a site you would have a valuation and you would have your valuer's notes, so you would write your valuer's notes down in your valuation. Now, that could take in the form of e-mails, it could take in the form of site visits, it could take in the form of telephone conversations, so you would, again, expect every valuer to have a site notes and to have them up-to-date, but I can tell you one ... one sort of a small fact which ... from ... I just ... I checked, in the past couple of days, about our ... we would run, with an insurance broker, a professional indemnity scheme for members to make sure that they're covered, and in the past four years, from 2010, '11, '12, and '13 ... In 2010, we've had two claims on our professional indemnity policies. We've had one in 2011, one in 2012, and one in 2013. Now, these policies are written by an insurance company, obviously. They're written by a broker first who would pass them onto an insurance company, so that if there are incorrectness with valuations, that's the place they should go. So, like-----