Explore the 1,600 missions of consulting firms for the State listed by “Le Monde”

By Manon Romain, Luc Martinon, Maxime Vaudano and The Decoders

Posted today at 8:01 p.m.

Assistance in the design of innovative projects, application maintenance in agile mode, support for inclusive innovation approaches, evaluation modules for senior officers… The list of missions entrusted by the State and its operators to consulting firms private is an impressive mishmash, from the most technical services to the most incongruous orders.

Publishing such an inventory was not easy. It will first have been necessary the revelation by Politico, in January 2021, of the role of the consulting firm McKinsey in support of the French vaccination campaign. The controversy that followed led to the opening of a senatorial commission of inquiry into the influence of private consulting firms.

The senators, who delivered their conclusions on Thursday, March 17, first hit a wall: there is no centralized database allowing them to count and analyze all the missions of consultants for the public sphere. . A situation that makes “difficult, both for the State and for civil society, to have an objective view of the place occupied by these firms in public policies”. To remedy this, the commission of inquiry calls for the publication of this data each year as an appendix to the finance law, in the form of open data.

In the meantime, the senatorial report ventures for the first time to deliver a figure, although imperfect: the senators have counted 945 consulting missions. The worldwhich investigated in parallel, identified hundreds more, arriving at a total of nearly 1,600 contracts since 2015, for an estimated amount of nearly 2 billion euros – figures probably lower than reality .

Who works for which ministry or entity? For what types of missions and what amounts? The world publishes, in a searchable table, the list of all the contracts identified in the context of this survey.

Explore all missions

? Click on a line to see the detail

This table aims to list the consulting services provided for the benefit of the State, ministries and the main operators in the public sphere since the start of Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term in May 2017. To achieve this, Les Décodeurs extracted data from public databases:

  • BOAMP: Official Bulletin of Public Contracts Announcements, which includes all calls for tenders above 40,000 euros,
  • TED: Tenders Electronic Daily, its European equivalent,
  • DECP: Essential Data of the Public Order, which contains the data of the expenses made;

We then added the list of 945 markets revealed on March 17 by the senatorial commission of inquiry into the influence of consulting firmscompiled from information sent to the Senate by all the ministries.

We checked all of this data by hand, in particular to prevent a contract mentioned in several sources from appearing twice. We have also endeavored to make this information understandable, for example by developing certain acronyms, or conversely by summarizing titles that are too long.

However, this exercise has several limitations. First, our list is not exhaustive, and sometimes incomplete. For some contracts, we are not able to give an amount, the name of the buyer or to detail the nature of the services (86% of the list provided by Bercy).

In the data from the commission of inquiry, the purpose of the missions ordered by the Ministry of the Armed Forces is systematically obscured and the list provided by the Ministry of Agriculture contains a large number of duplicates. In public sources such as BOAMP and DECP, it is difficult to trace the scope of consulting assignments, which are not grouped in a specific nomenclature in public documents.

The database is available in spreadsheet format at this address Where downloadable directly in CSV here.

“Consultocracy”: a five-year period of advice

Invisible, but omnipresent, what is the real influence of private consultants in the conduct of state affairs? This is the question posed by the Senate Committee on the influence of consulting firms on public policy, which issued its report on March 17. In parallel, The world conducted its own investigation, based on testimonies, open sources and requests for access to documents, to try to measure the impact of these firms on Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term.

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