Ex-bank head told of headage forms

Comparison was made at the DIRT inquiry between livestock headage payment forms and applications for non-resident accounts.

Mr Pat Rabbitte, TD for Dublin South West, had asked the former chief executive of the Bank of Ireland, Mr Mark Hely-Hutchinson, if he had ever seen an application form for headage payments.

When he said he had not seen one, Mr Rabbitte replied: "You can take it from me, they are immensely complex."

Mr Rabbitte then asked the former chief executive: "How is it that the same farmer who manages to fill in an application form for a headage payment has a difficulty with a non-resident form?"

Mr Hely-Hutchinson: "Well, if he is a farmer, which means by definition he is a resident, part of his difficulty might be that he doesn't know quite which answers he ought to give to make sure that he evades the tax."

Mr Rabbitte pointed out that eight years after he first expressed concern about "malfeasance", the Bank of Ireland still had a considerable problem.

Mr Hely-Hutchinson questioned the extent of malfeasance - which means wrong-doing - but accepted that a certain amount of documentation had not been cleaned up.

Mr Rabbitte said it seemed that "in other areas of banking the forms are always right, but in non-resident accounts they are always defective".

Mr Jim Mitchell said the bank would make sure that bank loan guarantee forms were properly completed.

Mr Hely-Hutchinson said he could not answer on the detail of the form because he did not believe he had seen it, but the chairman had to be wrong about guarantee forms.

"Why else would we have had so many bad loans as we did in the 1980s? Because it turned out that the documentation was defective."