Once a year, the Federal Government informs the Budget Committee of the Bundestag of which external advisory services the ministries have used. The answers of the Federal Ministry for the Environment were short. The House of Minister Svenja Schulze (SPD) regularly informed Parliament that there were no expenses for advisers.
The Bundesrechnungshof (BRH) did not want to be satisfied with these answers. He checked the information provided by the Ministry - and came to a very different conclusion.
Thus, the Federal Ministry for the Environment (BMU) is to have "awarded contracts for support services with a contract value of at least 600 million euros" in the period from 2014 to 2018. So it says in a report of the auditors, who went in these days to the budget committee of the Bundestag and the SPIEGEL is present.
Why did the services have to be created externally?
The officials of the Bonn Court of Auditors obviously had a great deal of work to determine the exact size of the orders - and sharply criticized it: "The BMU stated that it did not lead to comprehensive records containing all information requested by the Federal Court," complains the BRH. The Ministry of the Environment, however, had stated that such records were "expendable".
A total of 44 projects looked more closely at the Federal Court of Audit. In their analysis for the Bundestag, the inspectors give some examples of external advisory efforts in the Ministry of the Environment: such as studies on the ecological design of tourism or the Global Environment Pact, where the contractor should give advice on "goal-oriented solutions for negotiations". For example, for the climate protection action program 2020, too, a contractor should draw up "proposals for measures" and "critically evaluate" proposals from other ministries.
The Federal Court of Auditors criticizes the fact that the Ministry of the Environment was unable to provide sufficient proof of why the service was provided outside the home and why its own officials could not have created it. Numerous achievements in the 44 traps had affected "ministerial core tasks of the BMU", criticized the examiners. There is a danger of dependency "in terms of the type, duration and intensity of the consulting services."
After the Leyen and Scheuer it now gets a SPD minister
It is not the first Federal Ministry that has attracted the grudge of the Federal Court of Auditors because of high consulting fees. The Ministry of Defense under the former minister Ursula von der Leyen (CDU), for example, faces a parliamentary commission of inquiry following an affair concerning the awarding of advisory services. Even Federal Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer (CSU) must justify why his house has spent hundreds of millions for lawyers and commercial law firms, such as in toll issues.
Now it gets an SPD-run house. The lack of control over the granting of consulting contracts leads from the point of view of the Federal Court of Audit to the fact that again and again different order volumes have been mentioned.
The Court of Auditors report reveals a sometimes questionable understanding of the BMU's transparency vis-à-vis Parliament. When the Left Party in the Bundestag asked for external consultants in the Federal Government in February of this year, an internal inquiry from the Environment Ministry for the period between 2014 and 2018 revealed a total of 3685 contracts worth € 587.7 million. According to the Court of Auditors, the BMU found that the information was "out of line" compared to other ministries. It corrected its message the next day "because of the political importance" on 1000 orders with a contract volume of 110 million euros. The Court of Auditors states: "The BMU could not reasonably explain to the Federal Court of Auditors the reasons for the numbers and the contract value of the contracts that were changed within a single day, as the case file did not indicate that the data was collected again.
"Secretiveness and deceit"
The Greens' budget spokesman in the Bundestag, Sven-Christian Kindler, sharply criticizes the practice of the Ministry of the Environment: "It is completely unacceptable that the Ministry of the Environment has deliberately deceived the Bundestag in its external advisory services for years - that's just not possible," says Kindler. "Svenja Schulze must now end the secrecy and deceit and comprehensively clarify to what extent and from whom it has given consulting services.The Ministry of the Environment urgently needs to build more expertise with its own staff."
The BMU contradicts the current findings of the auditors. The ministerials criticize the BRH report for the definition used by the examiners, which is an external consulting service. In the BMU many contracts with consultants would be concluded as "work contracts". These were "no external consulting services" and therefore would not have to be reported. Also, it has been sufficiently documented that there were no alternatives to the contract. Moreover, there would be "no danger of imminent dependence on external expertise," according to the Ministry of Environment's objection to the BRH report.
The Bonn inspectors, however, uphold their criticism, and they make a clear request, so that the government acting in relation to external consultants after all transparent and comprehensible is: "The Federal Court of Auditors believes it is indispensable for these findings that the BMU for its business comprehensive information on the orders placed, "states the 38-page report.
