2023-07-10 16:18:04
Barthélémy Philippe with AFP / Photo credit: ERIC BERACASSAT / HANS LUCAS / HANS LUCAS VIA AFP 6:18 p.m., July 10, 2023, modified at 7:21 p.m., July 10, 2023
The Court of Auditors pointed Monday to “inappropriate” recourses by the government to private consulting firms, asking the State to clarify the rules governing their intervention which has led to financial slippages. More than a year following the report of the Senate which had qualified as “sprawling phenomenon” the missions entrusted by the State to private firms, the institution of the rue Cambon claimed in its first report written at the request of citizens a practice “better controlled”.
“Intervene in the decision-making process”
The Court notably accuses the State of letting certain private service providers such as the firms EY, BCG or Roland Berger fulfill missions falling within the “core business of the administration”, or even “intervene in the decision-making process” (Eurogroup, Capgemini ). “It’s false,” assured AFP David Mahé, president of Syntec Conseil, the professional union of consultants. “We do not want to decide for the decision-makers,” he insisted. Such practices were however attributed to consulting firms in March 2022 by Communist Senator Eliane Assassi and her colleague Les Républicains Arnaud Bazin.
Their report, released a few weeks before the presidential election, had poisoned the campaign ofEmmanuel Macron, pinned for his alleged proximity to big names in the council. The National Financial Prosecutor’s Office opened two judicial investigations in October 2022 on suspicion of illegal financing of Emmanuel Macron’s electoral campaigns and on the links between the presidential camp and members of the McKinsey cabinet who might have worked for free during the 2017 campaign. .
An “easy way out”
In its report published on Monday, the Court of Auditors considers that the use of private consultants has tended to become an “easy solution” for an administration with limited resources and deadlines. Outsourcing must find “a more adjusted and better controlled place among the various instruments of the administrations to carry out their missions”, they judge. If David Mahé pays tribute to “the wisdom and objectivity” of the Court of Auditors, which “recognizes the added value of advice” for the State, he calls for “not to have a conspiratorial approach which consists in seeing the hand cabinets behind every public decision.”
In 2021, the services ordered by the State from consultants cost 233.6 million euros, or 0.04% of State expenditure. “These are orders of magnitude much lower than in most comparable countries”, especially Germany and the United Kingdom, underlined the first president of the Court of Auditors Pierre Moscovici Monday during a press conference. However, between 2017 and 2021, the amount of these expenses tripled.
“Take action”
The Court of Auditors concedes it, the expenses fell to 200.2 million euros in 2022, the year of introduction of a circular from the former Prime Minister Jean Castex aimed at limiting the use of consultants. The State has also set itself targets for reducing its consulting expenditure: -15% in 2022 and -35% in 2023 compared to 2021. In its response annexed to the report, the Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne does not consider it “appropriate to define a finer doctrine for the use of intellectual services at an interministerial level”, the decision to use consultants should, according to her, rather be up to each ministry.
In addition to clarifying its doctrine of recourse to consultants, the State must appeal “whenever possible” to its own agents, further recommends the Court. “We are acting on all levels and are already responding to all of the Court’s recommendations,” evacuated the Ministry of Public Service in a message sent to AFP. After the creation of around thirty consultant positions within the administration in 2023, the same number of recruitments should be made in 2024, we detail from the same source. Very widely adopted in the Senate in October 2022, a bill aimed at further regulating the use of private consultants is still waiting to be examined in the National Assembly. “A law is more necessary than ever,” insisted Arnaud Bazin and Eliane Assassi in a press release released on Monday. “We have wasted enough time, the government needs to move from promises to action.”
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