A senior external auditor contradicted her own minutes of a meeting she had last October with AIB officials in which she had made clear the direct involvement of two chairmen of the Revenue Commissioner in agreeing the bank's liability for DIRT.
Ms Mary Walsh, a partner in accountancy firm Price Water house Cooper, told the Public Accounts Committee yesterday morning she now agreed with evidence given earlier by the bank, which denied that either the current chairman of the Revenue, Mr Dermot Quigley, or his predecessor, Mr Cathal Mac Domhnaill, were involved.
Asked by the committee's chairman, Mr Jim Mitchell, whether she could stand over her minutes of the meeting, Ms Walsh replied: "I unreservedly accept the position that the bank have represented. The note is incorrect."
Ms Walsh's minutes of the meeting on Friday, October 30th, 1998, said the bank had concluded that the DIRT issue had been "satisfactorily resolved" following a discussion with the chairman of the Revenue Commissioners (Mr Mac Domhnaill) until they got a phone call from Mr Quigley that had reversed that impression.
Asked to explain how she had got it so wrong, Ms Walsh said it was "possibly because of the length and complexity of the meeting", which lasted about two hours. She was taking rough notes and she had had "a lot of data" to deal with.
Her notes showed that the Revenue wanted to check the Form 37s (for non-resident accounts) in a number of the bank branches that had indicated problems - and also that AIB had "meetings with Revenue" and given them a copy of the controversial 1991 report written by group internal auditor Mr Tony Spollen, which had disclosed that the bank could be facing a DIRT liability of up to £100 million:
"The only conclusion that I can come to - and it's a conclusion that I come today rather than then - was that when I was writing my own note of a similar document I joined the two events together and incorrectly attributed the second meeting to the chairman of the Revenue Commissioners. I understand now that it took place with officials from the investigation branch."
Mr Pat Rabbitte asked Ms Walsh specifically how she had come to record the set of facts involving the chairman of the Revenue Commissioners and his successor: "How could that intrude into a note if it didn't feature at the meeting?"
They were not contemporaneous notes, she replied. She had dictated the note on the Monday following the meeting. That was her impression then.
"I concluded that, in describing the position to me, the bank did not mention the names of the people in the Revenue with whom they had had the discussions," she said.
The meeting with Mr Philip Brennan, AIB's head of group taxation, and Mr Noel Glennon, chief manager of corporate tax, took place some months after an article had appeared in the Sunday Independent which referred to the £100 million contingent liability.