Commonwealth Bank officials received a comprehensive dressing down at the hands of the counsel assisting the Royal Commission, Rowena Orr, on Tuesday.

It, like the other 40 institutions targeted, had been asked in December to list, in 50 pages or less, all examples of misconduct involving its executives and staff over the last decade.

This included those who worked for its affiliates such as Aussie Home Loans.

The Commonwealth was one of a number of the entities asked to resubmit their summer break homework for failing to address the brief.

It then received another solid rap over the knuckles for its updated offering with Ms Orr QC noting: "CBA's second submission was not in a form that made it possible to understand the type and scale of the misconduct".

She effectively accused the bank of trying to pull off a snow job by burying commission staffers under a deluge of documents, spreadsheets and raw data. And, worst of all, there appeared to be outright falsehoods as well.

After initially saying there had been no examples of misconduct at Aussie Home Loans, it's wholly owned mortgage broking firm, CBA has now admitted there were no less than 17 specific cases.

These included several instances where the Australian Securities and Investments Commission had disciplined Aussie brokers over so-called "liar loans" in which they submitted applications with exaggerated income figures to ensure they were approved.

"Liar loans" rank high on the commission's hit list of suspect activities given it is feared they make up almost a third of all Australian home lending.

A survey of borrowers carried out by UBS, an investment bank testing the strength of our lending sector, last year found only 67 per cent of mortgage applications were fair and accurate and that almost 40 per cent of applications through a mortgage broker had at least one significant misrepresentation.

UBS calculated that about $500 billion of Australia's $1.7 trillion in mortgage debt would have been lent on the basis of applications containing false information.

This meant Australia's banks were far more vulnerable to a housing market downturn, or interest rate rises which could lead to foreclosures, than most pundits thought.

These, and other practices such as NAB's "introducer program" under which third parties including real estate agents received hidden commissions for referring home loan customers, are indicative of a "greed is good" culture that fails to acknowledge the role played by Australian tax payers in underwriting our banks during the GFC.

While nobody wants the banks weighed down by excessive rules and red tape that would increase costs and reduce services for consumers, it is time to recognise the presumption these institutions are largely willing and able to regulate themselves, their staff and their agents is false.

The Royal Commission has opened the batting by indicating there is no place for obfuscations, half truths and delaying tactics at its proceedings.

This gives us cause to hope its' findings may lead to significant reforms.