Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I did not want to get into the public services card and an enforcement notice will probably be served on the Department. I welcome Mr. McKeon's openness and accountability in the general presentation but it seemed to desert him with the public services card matter. It is just a comment. We have already heard about the collateral undermining of the Comptroller and Auditor General and the comment should not have been made. I have it in front of me and I have read it numerous times in different contexts. Mr. McKeon should go back and read it. The roll-out of the public services card is chapter 10 of the Report on the Account of the Public Services 2015. Mr. McKeon quoted elements of good practice, which are in paragraph 10.18. It states, "Elements of a good practice business case were included in several documents examined." That is true. The next sentence begins with a big "however". It states, "However, there were a number of omissions or partially addressed matters." There were five of them and we can start with the last of them.

They are "A single project initiation document (PID) was not prepared", "There was no plan setting out how and when the project's benefits would be measured, and who was responsible/accountable for their delivery", "Key dependencies were only partially assessed" and so on, "There was no initial assessment of DSP's capacity to deliver the project" and so on. They are set out in very factual way. I do not have time to read the conclusions but Mr. McKeon can go back on them to see why we have questions about value for money, even before we speak about privacy or other matters raised by the Data Protection Commission, which I will not get into. The conclusions indicate that it was originally intended that 3 million public services cards would be produced by the end of 2013 but by the middle of 2016, two and a half years later, 2 million cards had been produced. It was stated the Department expected to incur costs of up to €60 million by the end of 2017, but what are the current costs?