2023-07-11 18:14:04
THE WORLD AFTER AFP
More than two years after the start of the controversy over consulting firms, the government is still reluctant to be transparent about the exact outline of the interventions of these consultants within the State.
The Minister of the Public Service, Stanislas Guerini, had nevertheless undertaken, in July 2022, to publish the list, “mission by mission”, interventions of the consultants, with for each of them the amounts involved, the sponsor, the service provider and the title of the service. But the budget document on the use of external advice published a few months later was content to list the ” main missions “ major ministries.
The world has had direct experience of this blocking of information by requesting the details of some 1,500 external consultancy missions carried out from 2017 to 2022 with around forty ministries and State operators. Our request, which dates back to February 2022, is based on the 1978 law, which guarantees public access to state documents.
The “deliverables” of consultants rarely communicated
Almost a year and a half later, we have only received documents for 30% of these missions. These are, for the most part, rather arid contractual documents, which provide little information on the concrete content of the services. The administrations only accepted to send us the “deliverables”, these documents produced by the consultants during their interventions, in 8% of the cases. And to provide us with the correspondence exchanged with the firms in only 1% of cases.
Although none of the ministries has, to date, fully responded to our requests, some have distinguished themselves by their lack of enthusiasm: the ministries of health and agriculture have only transmitted documents for nine missions each , out of a total of 328 services targeted in our requests, and most often omitting the “deliverables”. The Ministry of the Economy, a large consumer of consultants, has only communicated contractual documents, most of which are already public.
Most administrations have “sliced up” their mailings in dozens of batches, each comprising a handful of documents, sent over the months to the e-mails of journalists from the Monde. Many of the documents received also include significant redactions: a practice permitted by the law on the transparency of administrative documents, which aims to eliminate personal information and mentions protected by business secrecy, likely to harm the commercial interests of firms. advice involved. This is also the reason why the Ministry of Agriculture refused to send us certain documents by dematerialized means, ensuring that it was not able to guarantee “anonymization of records” only by sending printed documents.
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