Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent)
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1. To ask the Taoiseach why a company (details supplied) was awarded the contract for census printing and data capture services for Census 2016, given that the company is a wholly-owned subsidiary of an American owned contractor associated with human rights abuses in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; and if any other companies tendered for this contract. [9174/16]

Paul Kehoe (Wexford, Fine Gael)
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Census 2016 is being organised and carried out by the Central Statistics Office. Both the fieldwork and the processing of the collected forms are undertaken by CSO employees.

The census is a major undertaking for the CSO and contractors have been appointed to assist with specialised parts of the work. An outside contractor, CACI (UK) Ltd, was awarded the contract following a public procurement process to build and support an integrated forms processing system for CSO. The design and print of the Census forms was also required as part of this contract, and this has been sub-contracted to an Irish company.

The forms processing system will be managed and operated by CSO staff, with the technical support of a small number of CACI (UK) employees, and will be used to process the completed census forms in the second half of this year. The completed census forms, and any resultant databases of the returns created during the processing, will at all stages be completely under the control of the CSO and subject to the stringent confidentiality requirements of the Statistics Act 1993.

The selection of the contractor was subject to, and complied fully with, EU open procurement rules. CACI (UK) Ltd has specialist skills in the area of high volume forms processing systems and won a similar contract in 2011. CACI (UK) Ltd was the only bidder for the contract tendered by CSO for the 2016 census.

As a public body the Central Statistics Office is fundamentally committed to ethical and proper conduct in all matters.