BOOK REVIEW: The Great Irish Bank Robbery: The Inside Story Of Conflict, Betrayal & Corporate GreedLiam Collins, Mentor Books €14.99The Dirt and bogus non-resident accounts scandal, the largest fraud perpetrated on the State, plagued Irish banks and their customers for several years after author and journalist Liam Collins broke the story, writes Simon Carswell, Finance Correspondent.

The book The Great Irish Bank Robberyis a more than appropriate title for the book by journalist Liam Collins and for the story of the Dirt and bogus non-resident accounts scandal which plagued the Irish banks and bank customers for several years after Collins broke the story in April 1998.

Everyone was in on the scam - banks, bank managers and their customers, though some customers would claim not to have known that deposits in their name with an overseas address were bogus.

Even senior state officials knew there was a problem with non-resident accounts but chose to turn a blind eye in case an investigation sparked a run of genuine deposits.

Some unsuspecting customers certainly were not aware of the consequences of having money in these accounts and felt highly aggrieved in recent years to have to pay over lump sums in back taxes given that these accounts had been enthusiastically opened by bank officials.

Bankers felt bogus accounts were fair game because every institution in the country was opening them for customers. If they didn't, they simply lost the business to another bank.

The damage inflicted by the scandal has been immense. The Revenue Commissioners have collected €859.2 million since the controversy emerged - €225 million in deposit income retention tax (Dirt) from the banks and €634.2 million from depositors who owned back taxes on the money held in the accounts. It was the largest fraud ever perpetrated on the State.

Collins provides strong background on the genesis of the scandal - how AIB's internal auditor Tony Spollen raised concerns with some senior managers about Form Fs - the declaration statement that customers had to sign if they were non-resident. He was also worried about the massive sums of money, running to hundreds of millions, in purportedly non-resident accounts held by the bank.

The most intriguing aspect of the book is not so much in how the banks came to be flooded with bogus accounts, but in the relationships between the characters at AIB and Revenue who had to deal with the crisis at it emerged in private in 1991 and then in public seven years later.

The relations between Spollen, AIB chairman Peter Sutherland and the bank's chief executive Gerry Scanlan in the early 1990s are particularly fascinating and well chronicled by Collins. Spollen and Sutherland were very close having attended school together.

The relationship between Spollen and Scanlan was a polar opposite of this. Tensions arose between Spollen and Scanlan after the bank's underwriting of a failed share issue in oil exploration company, Dana Exploration, in 1988. Spollen wrote a report on Dana, but the bank wanted him to change it. This started to stir considerable tensions at the bank.

Spollen, a reluctant whistleblower, was the first to ask questions about the bank's possible massive exposure to Dirt on bogus non-resident accounts with senior AIB managers. He continued investigating the exposure against the backdrop of internal tensions within AIB - the bank wanted to move him from his position of internal auditor but Spollen refused to go.

He later agreed a severance package with AIB and left the bank after 22 years with the organisation. That could have been end of the affair, until the story became public in 1998.

The public got a chance to see the battle between Spollen and Scanlan first hand at the Public Accounts Committee's televised inquiry into the Dirt affair in September 1999, eight years after the internal ructions at AIB.

Scanlan launched an attack on his former internal auditor, saying Spollen's calculation of £100 million Dirt liability was fiction, "a back of beyond calculation and not one on which I, as chief executive, would form a value judgment". He said Spollen's behaviour was childish and suggested that Spollen had been aggrieved at how he had been treated by the bank.

Spollen responded angrily in evidence to the inquiry, defending his reputation and why he had raised certain issues during his time at AIB. He said he had been portrayed as "a disgruntled guy" with a chip on his shoulder, out to cause trouble. "Nothing could be further from the truth."

He went on to drop an embarrassing bombshell on the bank, saying what "drew the line" between himself and Scanlan was the failed Dana share issue and AIB's underwriting of it.

Collins captures the tension at the hearings well and picks out the gems of evidence from the lengthy Dirt hearings. The bank's dealings with Revenue in early 1990s over the Dirt issue are particularly interesting. The debate over whether or not AIB had reached a deal with tax inspector Tony "The Boot" McCarthy to cap its exposure on Dirt remains to this day.

The Public Accounts Committee sided with Revenue and AIB subsequently ended up making a tax settlement of £90 million (€114 million) - the largest ever by a company.

The book's focus on the role played by Spollen and on the Dirt inquiry is largely favoured over further detail on the heart-breaking stories of loss - financial and in some cases human - by depositors who were caught up, in some cases unwittingly, in the scandal.

The book has fascinating insights into how Revenue pieced together its investigations, particularly the swoop by tax inspectors on the unsuspecting businesses of Milltown Malbay, Co Clare, in 1990 and the collection of more than £3 million in unpaid taxes.

The timing of Collins's book on the Dirt inquiry, coming almost a decade after the scandal broke, is strange, given all the other banking controversies (rogue trading, overcharging and offshore tax evasion) that have emerged since then. Still, The Great Irish Bank Robberyprovides a lively, interesting and very readable account of a highly embarrassing episode in Irish financial life.

Simon Carswell is the author ofSomething Rotten: Irish Banking Scandals , published in 2006 by Gill & Macmillan.