Why test driven development is so difficult to accept?

This month I'll work in the central project of one of biggest italian bank. The architecture is fully J2EE with large use of EJB :-(

Since my group will touch very sensible part of code, my first one request to the customer was: "Where can I found your test cases and regression tests? I'd like to run their before and after our changes..."

The response was: "We don't have their, but we have planned to write someone..."

I hope to write first-shot-running-code to avoid to hear in the middle of the night the police to knock on my door... :-D