The weekend resignation of Bank of Ireland's chief executive over visiting adult Websites on his office computer may have been triggered by outsourced bank information technology workers seeking revenge for that move, according to a British newspaper report.
The London Register reported June 1 that Michael Soden may have been bagged by Bank of Ireland information technology staffers he had outsourced to Hewlett-Packard. Some of the staffers, the newspaper said, might have found the porn on his computer during what they called a "routine" maintenance check.
A year ago, when Soden still wasn't long in his position at BOI, bank staffers protested the shift to HP. "Staff were unhappy about the prospect of becoming HP employees," the Register said, "as they had enjoyed considerable perks at the Bank of Ireland: favorable mortgage and loan deals, for instance."
The staffers struck the bank, in a 24-hour walkout, but ended the strike when they were offered reportedly improved terms and conditions, including two years worth of job security for the 500 Bank of Ireland workers due to transfer to HP. The seven-year, $600 million outsourcing contract between BOI and HP was finalized last November.
The outsourcing deal was said to be Soden's second major decision after his appointment as the BOI's chief executive. The first? He updated the bank's "acceptable use" policy – which bars staff from accessing porn on company computers.
The staffers who found the porn told the bank about it three days before Soden resigned, the Register said, adding that information about the in-house probe leading to the porn find had been leaked to the local press.
"It would be disingenuous to suggest that the 'routine maintenance' was anything other than that, but it's clear that Soden's machine was thoroughly attended to," the Register said.
Soden was believed to have visited sites including one pumping a Las Vegas escort agency's offerings shortly before he was scheduled to travel to the United States on bank business.
The case continued to titillate Irish and British newspaper readers until the Register's revelation. The London News Review had almost suggested something untoward involved in the affair a day earlier, when it described Soden as taking "an idle browse" through the Las Vegas escort agency site, "his eyes misting" while examining one female escort's page which said she liked "good conversation," and noting he "thinks about how he hasn't had a really good conversation in years – and the next thing you know, he's typing his letter of resignation and packing his stapler and pot plants in a cardboard box."
In fact, the News Review suggested Soden was probably looking for stress relief more than titillation. "Mike Soden was the sad victim of Victorian social mores," said the paper, which went on later to suggest companies might think about letting workers see porn "on a carefully restricted basis," such as 20 minutes a day, with workers picking their times to watch and their bosses picking the sites they'd be allowed to see.
"The five minutes that the CEO of the Bank of Ireland spent looking at pretty girls showing their knockers on a Las Vegas escort site – even if it didn't prompt him to masturbate – almost certainly increased his productivity that day," the News Review said. "It gave his brain a chance to relax, to switch off from massive international monetary issues, and to think about sex instead."
Meanwhile, Bank of Ireland is refusing to say just how many other bank workers are being investigated for accessing adult sites on the job – or whether it's connected to the outsourced workers whose own systems-checking ended up undoing Soden.
"We have a group Internet policy and each case is being handled on its own merits. The number is irrelevant, as it is an internal matter. For customers, this is not relevant," BOI spokesperson Anne Mathews said in a statement.
