Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE)
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1023. To ask the Minister for Health the amount a company (details supplied) is being paid to operate the EU digital Covid certificate helpline on behalf of his Department; and if there are penalties for missed targets and poor delivery of service by the company. [41580/21]

Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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Over 3.3m Digital COVID Certificates have been issued via post and email from July 12th and remaining certificates are being processed for issue. Of course there are a small percentage of the overall number who have yet to receive their vaccination certificates and this relates to a number of factors e.g GPs who are uploading remaining data and also in cases where the quality of data is sufficient. This accounts for less than 0.9 % of all those vaccinated to-date.

To support the roll-out of Government policy, a helpline through the DCC Call-Center was set up to allow those members of the public who are travelling to deal directly with queries relating to the Digital COVID Certificate from Monday 19th of July 2021. The call centre has also since introduced new additional service channels. A new online form to request Recovery certificates for eligible persons was released on 22 July. Following this a portal allowing for Vaccine Certificate Request, Vaccine Certificate Details Update and a Vaccine Status portal were launched on the 30th July.

In order to mobilise the DCC Call-Center, DoH entered into a contract with Accenture to capture service requirements for the coming months. The contract, envisaged to run for 7 months, is based on an estimated fee of €6.5 million relating to an agreed scope, assumptions and estimate volumes. The contract fee is structured on a blend of components including a time and materials rate card based on the Office of Government Procurement (OGP) Multi Supplier Framework Agreement for the Provision of External ICT Technical Support Services (between Accenture Limited and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform), an estimate of fees based on a bill of materials for a CRM system, fixed fees based on call-agents resource levels and technology deployed and projected call volume from members of the public. The actual fees are determined on a monthly basis based on actual services and their performance levels delivered during the previous months, and the actual usage of consumption based services linked to call volumes from members of the public .