WHAT is it that good Christian bankers say? That the good Lord doesn’t close one branch without opening another? Last week Bank of Ireland announced that 10 of its branches would shut over the next few years. But hadn’t Bank of Scotland just announced that it was going to open 52 new branches in the old ESB shops in towns and cities around Ireland?

It wasn’t too long ago that the closure of Bank of Ireland and AIB branches was deeply resented by customers and the cause of much complaining on radio talk shows. However, as Bank of Scotland, Danske Bank and even Permanent TSB start taking up the slack in the big banks’ traditional rural strongholds, I expect the attitude to 10 more Bank of Ireland branch closures will be more “so what”, than “oh, no, not again”.

Anyone who is a confident internet user has an even greater choice of bank service, of course, since they can do their banking via their home or office computer or mobile phone. Which makes one wonder why the big banks are not doing more to encourage vulnerable customers — such as older people — to join the computer generation so they can also check their account balances, shift money between accounts and pay bills online.

I don’t accept for a second — and neither do the excellent people at Age Action Ireland — the patronising view that older people are incapable of becoming computer literate. They simply need encouragement and education. I keep in touch with older friends and relatives by e-mail who are quite comfortable on their laptops.

The minister for social welfare says he wants to break the cycle of isolation that affects social welfare beneficiaries such as the elderly and single parents. Providing them with subsidised access to the internet would be a good way to achieve that. Brian Goggin, the Bank of Ireland’s new chief executive, should be at the forefront of such an initiative too.

Jail the biggest tax transgressors

Michael Roche, a retired farmer, was probably a bit unlucky to find his name alongside fellow Limerick men such as Matthew Kavanagh, who recently settled with the Revenue Commissioners for €536,605, Brendan Nolan, who paid more than €309,959, or the late Dr Anne Teahan whose estate presumably ended up settling her €469,593 bill.

Roche owed €13,305, just €605 over the €12,700 limit which saw him end up on the Revenue’s published list of tax settlements. Since at least half that amount is made up of interest and penalties, it does seem to be a disproportionate punishment for what was probably an under-declaration of €5,000 or €6,000.

The farmer was doubly unlucky that his transgression wasn’t discovered a little later: from now on, only settlements of €30,000 or more will be listed.

I’ve no idea how Roche or the 181 other named parties feel about being on this list, but an automatic jail sentence for the biggest transgressors would be one way of cutting down the numbers. Why not introduce this penalty for anyone owing more than €500,000 after all the undeclared tax, interest and penalties are taken into account. Fourteen people fall into that category for the October to December 2004 period, with three owing more than €1m.

Double trouble over stamp duty

When I called one of the main banks last week on behalf of a Money reader who wanted to know how to switch her credit card without paying double stamp duty, I assumed the process was simple enough. Silly me. Nothing that involves tax, banks and a minister for finance is ever simple, as the answer provided by the bank in this week’s MoneyMatters column shows.

The fact that a credit card holder must get a signed and stamped certificate from the old bank to confirm that the €40 stamp duty on an existing credit card has been paid before another bank can issue a lower-cost, stamp- duty-exempt replacement, is positively Pythonesque.

The absurdity doesn’t end there. After much lobbying by the banks and consumer groups who argued that this duty was anti-competitive, the finance minister Brian Cowen corrected the anomaly in his December budget. Why then did he not extend the concession to the ATM and laser cards that each carry a €10 stamp duty and the combined ones with the €20 duty? Anyone who switches their current account following the introduction of the switching code designed to facilitate this change, is going to lose some of the advantage of lower charges by having to pay two sets of stamp duty for the year. Meanwhile, the Revenue website, www.revenue.ie, is expected to post a FAQ on the stamp duty on bank cards in the next few weeks.