Bacon: Mobile score system was flawed

AN EXPERT witness has told the Moriarty Tribunal that the scoring system used by a team of civil servants made it impossible to determine a winner from applicants for the state’s second mobile phone licence.

Economic consultant Dr Peter Bacon claimed the marking system used to assess rival bids contained significant “margins of error”. Dr Bacon said he also failed to understand why the group of senior civil servants had abandoned another “sound” element of the scoring system due to a lack of information.

“The margins of error inherent in that scoring system made it difficult to determine a robust and definitive result,” said Dr Bacon who was commissioned in 2002 to carry out a review of financial aspects of the competition for the phone licence by the tribunal.