The NAB has dismissed 20 staff and taken disciplinary action against 32 others over thousands of home loans in NSW and Victoria approved with suspect paperwork.

An extensive review by the bank identified 2,300 home loans since 2013 that may have been submitted without accurate customer information and/or documentation.

“What occurred was unacceptable,” says NAB Chief Customer Officer, Consumer Banking and Wealth, Andrew Hagger, said.

“We have investigated this matter thoroughly, and, as we have always said, whenever we find issues we will investigate them, fix them, and hold people to account — and we did.”

Some of the 20 dismissed, or who have since left the NAB, have been referred to the police, according to one report. Disciplinary action against others includes pay cuts.

Those with the home loans face a review of the documentation used to support their mortgage applications.

At a rough average of $411,000 for each mortgage, the NAB loans total about $945 million.

NAB first became aware of the issue in October 2015 and advised corporate regulator ASIC in December that year.

The bank has written to the 2,300 customers — many of whom live overseas — asking them to take part in a detailed review of their loan.

This could include verification of documents submitted at the time of their home loan application. Some customers may be offered compensation.

The bank says the remediation program has been designed with reference to the methodology applied by the Financial Ombudsman Service and with NAB’s standard approach to compensating customers.

NAB will hire an independent expert to do regular audits of the remediation program.

“I want to assure all of our customers that we have improved our systems, processes and programs as a result of what occurred here,” Hagger says.

The UBS banking team in September released its annual survey on Australian mortgage applications showing that only 67% of respondents believing their mortgage application was “completely factual and accurate”.

That means one third of mortgage applications have factual inaccuracies, the highest level in the three-year history of the survey.

The report was based on a survey in July and August this year of 907 respondents across Australia who had taken out a mortgage within the last 12 months

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