Six of the world's biggest consulting firms have been short-listed to prepare bids to build an engine that will be at the core of e-government strategy in the Republic.

The firms want to build a public services broker that would provide citizens with a single system to access public services over the telephone, internet or in person.

Accenture, HP, KPMG Consulting, Logica, PA and Siemens have been shortlisted to submit proposals on how to build a broker by the Reach agency, which is co-ordinating the strategy here.

These firms beat off competition from 22 other companies including Compaq, IBM, CSC Computer Sciences, Deloitte & Touche, PricewaterhouseCoopers, EDS and Vision Consulting.

The cost of the project has not yet been decided but it is likely to run into tens of millions of euro and involve a consortium of firms from the technology industry.

It will also see major competition over the type of equipment used to host and run the public broker. A pilot project set up last year was based on technology developed by Sun Microsystems but it is expected Microsoft will compete hard to win the contract.

The proposed broker would provide a suite of public services online and enable citizens to apply for passports online, pay tax and pay bills to public agencies.

The successful bidder would build a system that catalogues data about services, manages those services' delivery and creates a vault to store customer information.

To access public services from a single point of contact, citizens would be required to sign up to a registration process through which they can uniquely identify themselves to a broker. It is intended that each citizen will be able to use his/her own personal public service number as a single identification number to make it easier to access the range of services.

Several countries are working on similar projects but it is believed the Republic is among the first in Europe to go to tender for such a comprehensive system.