Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 30 June 2022

Public Accounts Committee

2020 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 27 - International Co-operation
Vote 28 - Foreign Affairs

9:30 am

Mr. John Conlan:

Okay. As part of that process, we did a procurement process for the passport operations system. We call it the passport issuance and processing system, or PIPS. We ran the tender competition. We had set aside a budget of about €7 million for that. Unfortunately, when we got down to the final evaluation of the tender, none of the bidders met the requirements of the tender so we had to cancel the tender competition. We then took some time, examined the lessons learned from what happened with the first procurement and went back and ran another tender competition. Last September we awarded a contract to service provider, a contractor, to work with us to develop a new passport issuance system.