Eight days before the examination in the Senate of a bill on this subject, the Ministry of Transformation and the Public Service clarified on Monday how it intended to better regulate the use of consulting firms in the public sphere.
The use of these firms, sharply criticized in March, in a report by senators Eliane Assassi of the CRCE group - communist, republican, citizen and ecologist -, with a communist majority, and Arnaud Bazin (Les Républicains), must meet three criteria, a explained a ministerial council.
Consulting firms must either provide "skills that we do not have in-house" 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.
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 millions of euros.
If this sum is exceeded, this will have to give rise to a “separate market”, we explain to the ministry.
Nearly 900 million euros in consulting expenditure in 2021
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, ”says the same source.
For the government, the bill is part of "a 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 represent, according to Arnaud Bazin, 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.