Superiors blamed for corrupt culture

AnalysisNIB employees have said that overcharging customers was "virtually standard practice", and was seen as a kind of sneaky "time and trouble" charge, writes Siobhan Creaton

"Well I would have sort of thought what sort of a nuisance has he been over the previous period and come up with a figure."

This was how one National Irish Bank employee decided how much he would overcharge his customers. And from the High Court inspectors report it is clear that many of his colleagues throughout the bank regularly made similar calculations that ultimately cost their customers more than €23 million.

The inspectors established that in one case an enterprising NIB employee increased the amount of interest the bank was charging on a loan to one of its customers by £300.

He did this because some of the customer's employees had run up bad debts with the local branch and and he wanted to devise a means to recover the bank's money.

When the High Court inspectors asked another employee who admitted to these practices if he/she had been the architect of this money spinning scheme, they were told "not at all." The employee explained: "This is one of the points I made to our internal auditors. I told them that whatever was in the report... I had not invented the wheel."

Numerous staff members who were interviewed during the six-year investigation said they were aware that this type of overcharging was virtually standard practice at NIB.

One member of staff told the inpsectors: "It was probably a sneaky way of making a charge that was seen to be properly due. I suppose it was easier than fighting with someone because of a fee. It was probably cowardly."

The bankers worked on the premise that their customers would have noticed if the bank suddenly started to impose new fees onto their banking transactions but that few would have easily spotted changes to the rate of interest they were paying.

The report says the tampering with interest rates was known amongst bank staff as "adjusting the decimal".

From their evidence, these bankers suggested that their propensity for overcharging was borne more out of a need to recoup the cost of the amount of time they had to spend dealing with custom accounts rather than boosting branch profits.

One described it as a "time and trouble" charge - they just didn't bother to inform the customer.

Many of those customers who were duped had moved their business to the bank in the early 1990s in response to its marketing gimmicks. They were also impressed with the bank's colourful chief executive, Mr Jim Lacey, who had become one of the best known bankers in the country.

NIB was aggressively chasing new business and its managers were all under pressure to win new customers at any cost.

The inspectors mention that NIB had set highly ambitious targets for its managers in terms of generating more fees and attracting new deposits, although they were offered limited support in the way of systems and training to enable them to achieve these targets.

"Managers felt under pressure to meet these targets, in the setting of which they had negligible participation and which many considered unreasonable; they feared criticism and possible humiliation before their fellow managers if they did not meet the targets set" according to the report.

In explaining the bank's role in encouraging and facilitating its customers to evade tax through bogus non-resident accounts or through unauthorised offshore investments, some managers said they did whatever was necessary to meet their targets.

One manager said: "It would have been a very brave man in the regime that was in the bank at that time, that would have stood up and \ counted and \ the deposits are actually going down by 20 per cent overnight, the reason being, X,Y,Z. I don't think anyone was brave enough to stand up and do that."

Another told the inspectors: "I was a bit more than flexible regarding the rules and maybe I bent the rules or turned a blind eye on occasions to achieve my targets."

The inspectors could only conclude that the branch managers' actions were improper, but noted that none of them benefited financially from these transgressions.

They laid the blame for the blatant abuse of customers and the tax laws with their superiors who had fostered a corrupt culture.