The Ministry of Transformation and the Public Service clarified on Monday how it intends to better regulate the use of consulting firms in the public sphere, eight days before the examination in the Senate of a bill to this effect. The use of these firms, sharply criticized in a report in March by senators Eliane Assassi (CRCE group with a communist majority) and Arnaud Bazin (LR), must meet three criteria, explained a ministerial council.
Consulting firms must either provide “skills that we do not have internally” or “respond to a specific need or workload” or even allow us to look at what is being done “elsewhere” in terms of organization of work or strategy in a given area.
Each mission capped at two million euros
Any service invoiced more than 40,000 euros to an administration must be the subject of a competitive call for tenders while, as announced at the end of July by the Minister of the Public Service Stanislas Guérini, each mission will be capped at two million euros. euros. If this sum is exceeded, this will have to give rise to a “separate market”, we explain to the ministry.
In order to avoid creating dependence on a consulting firm, a “turnstile” rule will be applied: in the event of multiple recourse by an administration to consulting services, “we necessarily take the last of the list which has not yet had the market”, specifies one of the same source.
Expenditure estimated at 893.9 million euros in 2021
The bill is part of the government’s “continuum of actions already under development”. The government has no plans to cap its consulting spending globally, which according to the Senate report amounted to 893.9 million euros in 2021.
But he decided, in a circular dated January 2022, to reduce the amount devoted to these services by 15%, excluding IT consulting expenses, however, which, according to Arnaud Bazin, represent 72% of these expenses. The Interministerial Directorate for Public Transformation (DITP) has also announced the recruitment of 15 in-house agents specializing in consulting, particularly in strategy.