Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein)
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302. To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the reason a more expensive contract was awarded to a company (details supplied); if he will detail the method by which the prices tendered by competing companies are aggregated for the purposes of scoring the price section of a tender. [22413/13]

Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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In July 2012, the NPS advertised an open competition for the Supply of Custom Envelopes on the eTenders website, which detailed a range of envelopes that were the most commonly purchased by public bodies. This Request For Tender (RFT) also outlined the qualifying criteria for specific paper quality and sizes, nationwide delivery to hundreds of different public bodies, provision of a dedicated website and various environmental conditions.

In addition to the criteria above, any interested parties were invited to tender their best prices for the full range of these contract envelopes.

Following a full evaluation of all the tenders received, the contract was awarded to Koverto Envelopes Ireland Limited, and not the company named by the Deputy in this Parliamentary Question, as they offered the most economically advantageous tender which included the lowest prices. The prices offered by Koverto Envelopes Ireland Limited were significantly lower than those offered by Trimfold Envelopes.

The method by which the prices tendered were scored was fully explained in the Section 3.3.2.4 of the RFT:

"Tenderers must submit one cost for each item in all the Pricing Quantity Columns in the pricing schedules B1, B2 and B3; in addition to the Paper Specification spreadsheet contained in Appendix 2. Failure to complete all of these spreadsheets will be deemed a fail. All Pricing Quantity Columns in Schedules B1, B2 and B3 will be totalled to give the overall tendered cost for the items."

This methodology for evaluating the prices submitted has been used by the NPS many times in the past and is clearly laid out in the RFT. There were no questions raised about its use in this competition by any of the tenderers. It was only after Trimfold Envelopes failed to win the competition, and launched an unsuccessful High Court challenge to the result that any issue was raised about this method.