Private consulting - Phenomenal waste of money

IN A properly run company those who hire outside private consultants must show value for money, or they would be fired.

In the public service, however, they have been wasting public money on consultants to draw up reports that are often ignored.

One of the biggest scandals since Fianna Fáil came to power in 1997 has been the expenditure on electronic voting machines that have never been used. They cost more than €50 million to purchase, and they have been costing €500,000 a year to store. For what? They have never been used, and there are no plans to use them this year. Does anyone believe those machines will ever be used? A fortune is being wasted in throwing good money after bad. The taxpayer is certainly not benefiting from the maintenance of those machines.

The latest figures released indicate the Department of the Environment spent €36,090 on outside consultants to review the storage of the voting machines. Did they not have the expertise within the Department to undertake that review without wasting money by farming out the task? The department spent €1.2m on consultant reports in 2006, and this jumped to €1.6m in the first nine months of 2008. In other words, the environment department’s average monthly spending on outside consultants actually increased by a phenomenal 77%. “A lot of work being done by consultants should be done in-house by civil servants,” a spokesperson for the department admitted.

Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin stated that he was very conscious of the need to achieve value for money on consultancy. He said his department only engages outside consultants when the knowledge and skill are not available within the department. Last year his department almost doubled its spending on consultants by mid December. This should be explained because it makes a mockery of the economies supposedly being implemented by the Government.

The Department of Finance warned in early 2008 that departments should cut back on private consultants, but the overall bill for these consultants has actually been increasing. In fairness, the Department of Finance has dropped its expenditure on consultants from €2.5m in 2007 to €767,000 last year. That amounted to savings of about 69%, but the performance of most of the other departments has been pathetic.

In the past 22 months, the 14 government departments have paid private consultants a huge €55m. In 2007 they spent €28.6m on private companies, but, notwithstanding the call for cutbacks, the departments spent €26.2m in the first 10 months of 2008. The monthly average expenditure actually increased by more than 10%.

This is a frightening display of Government incompetence and an indictment of the bulk of the civil service.