Genevieve Carbery reports:
Unauthorised access to the bank accounts of 13 employees and three customers by a former Allied Irish Banks worker was “absolutely not” acceptable, a senior AIB manager said yesterday.
Former AIB Capital Markets employee Brian Purcell (38), from Dublin, was dismissed in April 2009 after the bank discovered he had accessed the accounts, the Employment Appeals Tribunal heard yesterday.
At an earlier hearing of the case last April, Mr Purcell claimed he was dismissed after he revealed information through a whistleblowers’ charter about irregularities in accounting systems in February 2008.
An annual bonus was not paid to the junior manager in March 2008. Later that month, he accessed the accounts of his colleagues.
The excuse Mr Purcell gave for “invading the privacy” of 16 people’s bank accounts was to see whether they had received the bonus, Patrick Hanratty, counsel for AIB, said yesterday.
Read more in The Irish Times.
Interestingly, the story references an earlier time when the former employee also allegedly improperly accessed employee accounts. The Verizon-USSS report that noted that in investigating insider breaches, they often found a history of smaller or misbehavior that may have been an omen of more serious problems to come. Do entities need to be less forgiving of “minor infractions” or “first time offenders?” Perhaps.