The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report is a damning indictment of the Irish banking sector. It concludes that the sins perpetrated by the State's banks and building societies in the 1980s and 1990s were so grave that it will take the introduction of onerous legislation to keep our senior bankers in line in the future.
The committee could not have been more explicit in its findings and it has laid the blame for years of inaction and deceit in relation to the collection of DIRT tax on the plush boardrooms of the State's financial institutions.
"The boards of directors must accept full responsibility for the companies over which they presided and clearly the role of the board and individual directors in financial institutions requires new guidance, vetting and checking by the Central Bank," it concluded.
The report goes on to state that the boards of directors of financial institutions generally betrayed an "overly relaxed attitude" towards discharging their statutory and fiduciary duties to collect DIRT. And it's not as though the men and women who are elevated to such dizzy heights in the banks generally lack boardroom experience or are blissfully ignorant of the responsibilities attached to such plum jobs.
The PAC sub-committee has rightly highlighted the wealth of experience and talent that characterises the board of a major financial institution.
It should also be noted that non-executive directors are appointed to act as watchdogs for the shareholders and are handsomely rewarded for their efforts. It is clear the sub-committee could find no reasonable justification for their behaviour on this issue.
"Given the eminence of many of the members of the boards of directors of financial institutions, it is surprising that they did not bring a greater weight to bear on the enforcing of ethical standards either within their organisations or the banking sector generally," it said.
It has been established that all financial institutions knowingly opened non-resident deposit accounts for their customers which allowed them to evade DIRT tax. Despite assertions to the contrary by many of the witnesses who appeared before the subcommittee's hearings this year, the abuse of non-resident accounts was an open secret throughout the banking industry in the 1980s and 1990s.
Everybody knew it was a scam. The thousands of customers who readily opened these accounts knew they were on to a good thing. The individual bank branches were just providing a service and bringing in new business. And sure if they weren't prepared to provide these accounts, the customer could always go to one of their more obliging rivals.
But gradually the banks' own internal auditors were beginning to draw attention to the huge growth in non-resident customers throughout the State. But in many cases their observations were ignored by the higher echelons of the organisations involved.
The report states: "No evidence emerged in an examination of the behaviour of the boards of financial institutions generally to suggest the operation of a planned and pragmatic work-out of the problem of bogus non-resident accounts."
And while it is legitimate to castigate the boards as a whole, it is the chief executives - the men who bore the day-to-day responsibility for managing the banks - who come in for the most scathing criticism in the committee's report.
The DIRT Inquiry focused primarily on six financial institutions - AIB, Bank of Ireland, Ulster Bank, National Irish Bank, Irish Life & Permanent and the State-owned ACC Bank.
Of them, AIB and ACC were identified as the worst offenders when it came to promoting bogus non-resident accounts during the 12 years under investigation. Yet their chief executives claimed to have had no direct involvement with the problem. The report finds it "extraordinary" that there appears to have been no significant involvement by AIB's then chief executive, Mr Gerard Scanlan, in relation to the DIRT issue.
And it describes as "remarkable" claims by ACC's former chief executive, Mr John McCloskey, that his bank's considerable DIRT problems never exercised him to take any corrective action.
"The sub-committee finds it incomprehensible that this state of affairs continued even after the chief executive received the first draft of the Long Form report" - the report which highlighted a potential £17.5 million (€22.22 million) DIRT liability at the bank in 1993.
Even institutions such as Bank of Ireland and Ulster Bank, which emerged head and shoulders above the rest of the group, were shown to have been less than open with the Revenue Commissioners when they uncovered potential DIRT arrears. In NIB's case the sub-committee concluded that letters from its top executives warning staff not to open bogus non-resident accounts for customers were largely ignored and the problem was allowed to fester. It's a remarkable state of affairs to see a report issuing recommendations for a change in legislation to force bank chief executives to take their compliance responsibilities seriously. The sub-committee has called on the Department of Finance, in conjunction with the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, to draft legislation which requires that each chief executive of a bank or building society must also become the tax compliance officer for his or her organisation. This measure aims to make the banks' top executives personally responsible for ensuring that their organisations make the correct tax returns to the Revenue Commissioners and sign off on that every year.
The sub-committee also wants the Revenue to be required to make regular compliance spot checks across the sector.
A scheme and procedure for bank officials to report suspected wrongdoing in their organisations have also been suggested.
The tone of the report underlines the deep sense of betrayal of trust felt by the committee towards the banks. Its findings, and indeed the poor performances of many of the sector's leading lights at the committee hearings, have left many reputations tarnished. The boardroom elite has been given plenty of food for thought.
