When National Irish Bank announced last March it was getting an outside consultancy to investigate the allegations of overcharging made in an RTE report, nobody thought to take it literally. This week it emerged that the brief given to Arthur Andersen was to investigate only those branches and those periods which had been referred to in the RTE report. In this way, the bank could be sure the independent consultancy would not discover fresh scandal which would then have to be suppressed or disclosed.

All very well but now the details of the report have been released and the bank finds itself in the very damaging position of publicly giving over £130,000 back to 370 personal and small business customers, while at the same time leaving a feeling abroad that there is more to come. As well as the Arthur Andersen exercise, the bank's parent group, National Australia, sent in its internal investigation team which "tested interest charging practices across the National Irish Bank branch network, covering the 10 year period since 1988". What that means is anyone's guess, though as the team only found charges of £34,816 which "lacked sufficient supporting rationale", the exercise was either a very slim one or NIB is an extraordinarily efficient organisation.

The public will now await the report of the two High Court appointed inspectors, former Supreme Court judge Mr Justice Blayney and Mr Tom Grace, expecting them to rule on the correctness or otherwise of the picture painted by the details released by the bank on Tuesday. Perhaps the public will have forgotten this week's figures by the time the inspectors' report comes out: the work of the inspectors is currently delayed by a Supreme Court appeal being taken by approximately 130 serving and former managers and senior executives on the "right to silence" issue. That appeal is being funded by the bank. However the inspectors' report will deal not only with the overcharging issue, but also with the sale of offshore bonds by the bank. About £500 million is involved in that controversy and it is already known that revenue prosecutions are likely to arise from it. Things are likely to get worse for NIB before they start to get better. The Arthur Andersen findings and the results of the internal investigation team's probe, are likely to be of little consequence in the long term.