“Highly anticipated”, this subject was suggested by Internet users, during a citizen consultation which ended on May 20.
After the Senate, the Court of Auditors in turn examines the links between the State and private consultants. This Monday, the first president of the institution, Pierre Moscovici, unveiled the six projects suggested by Internet users and on which the experts from rue Cambon were going to work by the end of 2023. Among these is “the use by the State of private consulting firms“, an explosive subject, long debated during the presidential election and on which the Court had not published a report for several years.
From March 9 to May 20, on the occasion of a “citizen consultationaimed at feeding its work programme, the Court offered internet users the opportunity to suggest ideas, comment on them and support them. Objective: to bring the institution and the citizens closer together, by including them in its decision-making processes. 9,000 participants were counted, making it possible to gather 330 proposals, detailed Pierre Moscovici in a video. The subjects were selected on the basis of several criteria, including the originality of the theme, the support obtained on the online platform.
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“Highly anticipated“, the report on consulting firms was supported on the platform by nearly 500 people and carried eight times, in particular by the Anticor association: this one wanted to alert “on the misuse of audit, consulting and strategy firms, the consumption of which by the state has increased considerably in recent years“.
The Court had not worked on this subject for several years, and the recent controversy showed that it was time to come back to it. In November 2014, a previous report, produced at the request of the Senate Finance Committee, had already highlighted a lack of control governing the use of private consulting firms. Expenses “are relatively limited in scale but unequally distributed between ministries and fairly largely concentrated on a limited number of service providers“, noted in particular the document. Four years later, in April 2018, a summary from the Regional Chamber of Île-de-France addressed to Agnès Buzyn, at the time Minister of Health, returned to the appeal “public contracts for consultants by public health establishments“. The note pointed to the results “often disappointing“and markets”frequently irregular“. “Financial studies are not very thorough and their assessments are sometimes erroneous“, she regretted, by way of example.
Towards publications next year
A subject widely debated for several months, the use of consulting firms has already been the subject of a Senate report, giving rise to a bill, tabled in June. The Minister of Transformation and Public Service, Stanislas Guerini, announced last week that he would present “a new frameworkquickly, to better regulate the use of these structures by the public authorities. For its part, the Finance Committee of the National Assembly, led by the rebellious Éric Coquerel, announced a fact-finding mission on these private entities, before turning aroundin front of the indignation of the senators who recalled that this work had already been carried out by their teams: the fact-finding mission will therefore only be launched later.
At the same time, the Court of Auditors has also selected the inclusive school as subjects of study – “access to school for students with disabilities“, specifies Pierre Moscovici -, the detection of tax evasion of individuals, equality between women and men, public support for federations of hunters, medical interim and permanent care. However, it will be necessary to be patient to read the results of these six surveys: the publication of the various reports is expected by the end of next year, or even the beginning of 2024.
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