2023-07-04 11:51:47
Consulting firms: the miracle solution to all the galleys of the State? The least dumb economist in France debunks for us the biggest fake news of recent years.
Photo caption: BONNET D’ÂNE_ A dream destination for young padawan who had left co school at one time, consulting firms now attract more dunces than real talent.
What are consulting firms for? To explain to the State, while being paid the price of gold, “how to do better with less”. With what method? “Ready-made solutions” provided “turnkey” and generally presented on a nice PowerPoint. With the “McKinsey affair”, a consulting firm that intervened at the highest level of the French State during the pandemic while practicing tax optimization strategies (much like a farmer who wants to milk a cow while refusing to feed), the place of consulting firms in the public sector has hit the headlines. According to a Senate report from March 2022, expenditure on state consulting missions exceeded one billion euros in 2021.
An important question comes to mind: why does the State, when it has senior civil servants within it, trained in the same high schools as consultants in consulting firms, need to pay handsomely assignments to the private sector? It must be understood that at the head of the state, many senior civil servants share the virtues of the super-managerial techniques of the private sector. Many are convinced that the public sector tends to waste money and that the use of consulting firms allows better management of resources (this is surely the Excel spreadsheet effect). In reality, these senior officials share the same ideology as the consultants they hire. It is enough to read the reports of Bercy or the Court of Auditors to understand their vision of economic policy. They want to impose on society, under cover of neutrality, the reduction in the number of civil servants, the increase in working time for teachers, the control of the unemployed, the raising of the retirement age, the reduction of pensions, the reduction of hospital stays, the reduction of allocations to local authorities, etc. In effect, senior officials are asking consulting firms to do the dirty work (validating what they think) while paying them with taxpayers’ money.
SLIPPER PRACTICE
The senior official and the consultant are interchangeable. Same studies, same suit, same watch, same vision of society, same holidays. If you had been shown the face of our President fifteen years earlier and asked if he was President of the Republic or president of a large consulting firm, it would have been difficult to answer.
Moreover, in France, the generalization of the practice of pantouflage leads to an extremely unhealthy mix of genres between large firms and senior civil servants. Our President, finance inspector then banker at Rothschild before becoming Minister of the Economy, is the best example of this. It should be kept in mind that, in our country, it is possible to run Social Security one day, then the next day to work for a large private insurer. Just as it is possible to move from tax legislation to the tax management of a large group. The use of consulting firms is only further proof of the rout of a State which is losing the notion of general interest.
Well, you are going to tell me that there is worse. One can be European Commissioner for Climate Action like Connie Hedegaard, then join Volkswagen (one year after the scandal – already forgotten – of the engines rigged to underestimate pollution). Or even worse, being president of the European Commission like José Manuel Durão Barroso and then getting a chairmanship at Goldman Sachs. And after that, some are surprised that conspiracy theories abound on social networks…
By Thomas Porcher
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#McKinseys #broken #arms #Technikart