I came home today to receive a letter from the BDO with AIB's Response to my 2nd Response. Before I submitted the above letter I re-read over all my documentation and I realised that in AIB's response they made the following statement:
"The Customer includes two sentences in quotation marks in her Additional Submission. It is not clear from where the Customer claims to have taken these apparent quotes. The second sentence, in quotation marks, stating "we had a prevailing rate but we did not offer it to you" is misleading. The Bank did not say this"
At no stage in my 1st Response did I not reference anything in quotation marks and neither did I put in the "second sentence in quotation marks". So I called them out on this in my response indicating where I had referenced every single quotation in the previous response and as for the "second sentence" I added the following:
"At no point in my previous submission did I make this statement and for the Bank to include a response of this nature, that would cast aspersions on my integrity, is highly unprofessional.
From both the quotations above, which are clearly referenced, it leads me to believe that the Bank did not read my response and instead sent me on a generic response. I have spent a considerable amount of time carrying out research, discussing the issues at hand with subject matter experts and other concerned parties and carefully constructing both my previous and current responses. I would expect for the Bank to conduct itself in a professional and ethical manner and treat not only my appeal, but every appeal with due diligence, care and consideration as opposed to sending me a generic response that is not wholly reflective of the response I submitted."
So the Response I got back from the Bank today, through the BDO stated the following:
"The Customer has raised a number of points in her additional submission, the majority of which have been responded to by the Bank in our Case Summary and Response and in our Response to the Customer's First Additional Submission.
However, in relation to Point 4 of the Customer's 2nd Additional Submission, the Bank acknowledges that the two quotes referred to by the Customer that we had included in our Response were attributed to the Customer in error. We would like to apologise for this error, and confirm that the Customer did not include these two statements in her 1st Additional Submission"
The BDO cover letter was the same as the previous one attached to AIBs response, so I have 5 days to contact BDO if I wish to make any further submissions.
I'm pretty sure I will be receiving the same rejection letter as everybody else pretty soon but this was proof that AIB are not even reading all submissions and throwing back generic responses.