Deficient declarations for non-resident accounts would not have been filled out by serious tax evaders unless they had frontal lobotomies, the group chief executive of Ulster Bank, Mr Martin Wilson, told the DIRT inquiry yesterday.
Commenting on the widespread phenomenon of declarations being filled out incorrectly by depositors opening non-resident accounts, he said there was a difference between those accounts and bogus non-resident accounts.
If he was going to evade tax, he would make sure he filled out the form correctly.
"Simplistically, I feel that when you see people coming in with documentation deficiency that there must have been a lot of frontal lobotomies going on for the people that were trying to evade tax."
But Mr Wilson agreed with the chairman, Mr Jim Mitchell, that the law on DIRT compliance was precise and that where the paperwork was incomplete, the bank is obliged to deduct DIRT from non-resident accounts.
Mr Pat Rabbitte: "You are not familiar then with the doctrine of defective paperwork that has been advanced to us by others?"
Mr Wilson: "We seem to be pretty good at that, actually, ourselves. I said earlier I was disappointed and I remain very disappointed."
According to the Comptroller and Auditor General's report, successive audit reports within Ulster Bank found high numbers of deficient or absent declarations between 1988 and 1998.
Asked by Mr Sean Ardagh did it not seem strange that there were 75 per cent deficiencies in form filling in 1991, Mr Wilson said: "Clearly, it's not something that we're proud of," but some of the documentation would have been misfiled.
Mr Wilson added that Ulster Bank did not get an impression in 1987 that the then minister for finance, Mr Ray MacSharry, had said Revenue inspections on non-resident accounts would not be carried out.
But no representative from the bank had attended the meeting.
Mr John McNally had written a memo from an Irish Bankers' Federation meeting he attended and which was subsequent to the minister's meeting.
In the memo, he wrote: "Inaccuracies in tax-exempt documentation can, during any Revenue Commissioners' review, have a potential substantial cost to the bank and one which need not arise where the procedures are closely followed."
"I think that would support his view that he was under no illusion but that the Revenue had the right and could exercise the right of inspection at any time as far as the Ulster Bank was concerned," Mr Wilson said.
Mr Wilson, who was group treasurer from the late 1980s to 1995, said the total commercial deposits in 1986 were of the order of £730 million, which rose to about £3.5 billion last year.
A KPMG partner and the external auditor for Ulster Bank, Mr Richard George, told the inquiry DIRT compliance "was lightly policed by the Revenue". "I was aware that financial institutions were not checked in the same way as, let us say, Revenue audits." But he had not been aware of the extent of the problem until recent months nor was he aware of any directive prohibiting Revenue from carrying out inspections.
Mr John Crawley, head of group tax, Ulster Bank, explained that the group's suggested £900,000 retrospective DIRT liability had been computed on the assumption that no forms or defective forms gave rise to "a technical liability". "And we cross-multiplied to the numbers against the average balances during the period and worked out a £900,000 figure." The £300,000 of that figure, representing no forms in place, could now be taken down to £30,000, based on the appointed auditor's calculations of liability.