From 2021, the financial magistrates reviewed the contracts concluded between 2020 and 2021 from the firms McKinsey, Accenture, Citwell, JLL and Roland Berger.
Several consultancy contracts have been entered into by the State under conditionsproblematic” during the Covid-19 health crisis, noted in 2021 a confidential report from the Court of Auditors, whose newspaper The world revealed the existence on Monday. In this document consulted on Monday by AFP, the financial magistrates examine a series of contracts concluded in 2020 and 2021 with the firms McKinsey, Accenture, Citwell, JLL and Roland Berger. The first two firms were called upon as part of a call for tenders launched in 2017 by the Interministerial Directorate for Public Transformation, to help develop the vaccination strategy.
According to the Court, he thus “It was considered that the vaccine strategy could be linked to public transformation. This connection appears largely artificial.» «Indeed, the designated projects must be part of the objective of improving the effectiveness of public action while reducing its cost.“, criteria that the mission on the vaccination strategy did not meet. The Citwell firm, which received 2.3 million euros including tax from eight assignments carried out in 2020, has “organized logistics flows” (including masks and other protective equipment) and transmitted “dispatch orders to Public Health France and to the various beneficiaries“.
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Persistent abnormalities
If certain missions entrusted by the government to Citwell “correspond to the role that can be assigned to a private service provider, it is less normal for the latter to be required to ensure the day-to-day execution of the missions, by employing for this purpose three to four full-time equivalents depending on the period“, Regrets the Court of Auditors. Finally, the rue Cambon institution finds “unnatural“that the government has delegated to the Roland Berger cabinet missions falling within the remit of the administration, “even though it has a powerful internal inspection body [l’Inspection générale des affaires sociales]whose members have all the required skills.»
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The institution therefore recommendsstrictly limit the use of consultancies to technical missions for which the central administration departments of the Ministry of Health do not have the required skills internally“. A recommendation taken into account by the government, which unveiled a new framework for the use of consulting services, applicable from 2023. According to the Ministry of the Civil Service, firms must either provide “skills that we do not have in-house“, that is “respond to a specific need or workload.»
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