How many consultants intervene each year on behalf of the State? What are the nature and cost of their missions for public finances? As simple as they are, these questions remain unanswered today, due to the opaque, even taboo, nature of the contracts entered into by the public service with consulting firms.
A senatorial commission of inquiry dispelled part of the mystery by publishing, on March 17, a detailed report on the subject, accompanied by a list of nearly a thousand consulting services carried out during Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term. , than The world put online, together with a search engine.
But this progress is not enough to make all the transparency on the extent of the use of consultants by the State. Produced from information sent to the Senate by the various ministries, the list is incomplete: it contains neither contracts of less than 150,000 euros, nor missions prior to 2018, nor services provided for State agencies. The nature of many missions is not specified: the Ministry of the Armed Forces asked to hide them in the name of defense secrecy, while the Ministry of the Economy simply declared itself unable to find the titles of 99.2 % of its missions.
A great vagueness on the content of the missions
In addition, these are only data published from time to time, not out of a desire for transparency, but at the request of the senatorial commission of inquiry, which has the power to impose constraints on the ministries during its work. The circular issued in January by the Castex government, supposed to better regulate these services, does not provide for any additional measure of transparency. This is the reason why the senators demand, in their report, that the list of benefits be henceforth made public each year, for example, in the budgetary documents annexed to the finance laws.
To date, the information from public databases on public contracts (BOAMP, TED, DECP) remains extremely fragmented and does not allow consulting assignments to be precisely targeted. Many services are drowned in “framework agreements”, these very general mega-contracts awarded over several years to consulting firms, from which ministries can draw to meet their consulting needs, without issuing new calls for tenders .
Contracts with private companies are not subject to the rules of ethics established by the laws of moralization of public life
This “lack of transparency concerns all public contracts awarded by the government”points out Mathias Amilhat, lecturer at Toulouse-I-Capitole University, who notes that the contracts signed with private companies, located in a “grey area”are not subject to the rules of ethics established by the laws on the moralization of public life voted in 2013, in terms of transparency and the prevention of conflicts of interest.
Finally, there is still very little information on the real nature of these benefits. Behind the sometimes abstruse titles of the assignments, such as “benefit” or “external evaluation of services”, what is the concrete work provided by the consultants? What recommendations do they deliver to the administration? Where are the reports they produce? Even senators have hit a wall during their hearings, with ministers sometimes unable to justify the rationale for certain benefits.
Disorganization or deliberate desire for opacity?
This situation is partly explained by the State’s own disorganization, which does not have an overall vision of the scope and content of the missions carried out by the consulting firms. There is no centralized list of services ordered by the State, acknowledged before the Senate Thierry Lambert, the boss of the interministerial directorate for public transformation, precisely created in 2017 to centralize and evaluate the government’s advisory missions. And this, eight years after a report by the Court of Auditors which alerted the State to the lack of traceability of these missions.
The ministries refused to communicate to the “World” the list of consulting services sent to the Senate
But the mystery that continues to reign over the public council also results from the government’s reluctance to communicate on the issue. Requested from the month of February, all the ministries refused to provide the World the list of consulting services that they sent to the Senate, as well as the recommendation documents resulting from these missions (the “deliverables”), and the qualitative assessments.
Nor did they respond to our detailed questions on the content and interest of certain consulting assignments, sometimes being more silent than the consulting firms themselves. The Public Investment Bank, which depends on Bercy, has, for example, taken refuge behind the “business secrecy” and the “signed confidentiality undertakings” with its service providers to refuse to respond.
However, in the absence of transparency, “it is difficult both for the State and for civil society to have an objective view of the place occupied by these firms in public policies”, as the Senate report pointed out. This is the reason why The world seized in March the Commission for access to administrative documents, an institution to which any citizen can turn in the event of difficulty in obtaining the communication by the State of documents of public interest.
“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 asked 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.