Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 25 June 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Professor Patrick Honohan:

Yes. The exercise that was carried out in September and October 2013, which was the subsequent exercise following the BlackRock exercise of March 2011, we engaged a lot of auditing firms to second guess the auditors of the banks and we got ... you know, there are only a small number of big firms but we got ... if auditor A had done the job for one bank, we'd get auditor B to come in and second guess, doing it on a sample basis of this loan-by-loan calculation not exactly using the BlackRock models, we have those in our back pocket, but the loan-by-loan assessment with their awareness of what that BlackRock exercise had conducted. So with the AQR that we have done now is not just a repeat of the BlackRock exercise, we can do that in-house. But that's not what the SSM wants and we do it in a different way.