Federal government managers paid nearly $700,000 to consultants to get advice on how to save money on consultants, according to an Inquiry of Ministry tabled in the House of Commons.
The consultants were hired under a cabinet pledge to find $15 billion in savings. The federal government disclosed in the Inquiry document that the Department of Natural Resources hired consulting firm KPMG to “develop recommendations” to ensure Canadians’ tax dollars “are being used efficiently and being invested in the priorities that matter most to them.”
KPMG was paid $669,650 for the advice, as first covered by Blacklock’s Reporter.
The disclosure was made at the request of New Democrat MP Gord Johns, who asked if any third-party management firms were contracted to assist with identifying spending cuts. The firm was hired after Treasury Board President Anita Anand gave a directive to find specific cuts within government departments.
“This is not about doing more with less or arbitrary cost-cutting,“ Ms. Anand wrote in the Inquiry. ”This is about ensuring public servants and public funds are focused on the priorities that matter most.”
“The government is committed to responsibly managing Canadians’ tax dollars by ensuring operations and programs are effective, efficient and directed toward priorities,” she added. “Savings from underutilized government spending will be shifted to priorities like health care and the clean economy. This is about smarter, not smaller, government.”
Ms. Anand told reporters on Aug. 22 that the Liberal government was asking departments across the government to “take a look at [their] expenditures and determine where there is a possibility to refocus that spending.”
Months earlier, on Jan. 30, witnesses at a House of Commons government operations committee warned that spending on consultants was out of control.
“It’s hard to tell from the publicly available data what a given contract was for,” testified Sean Boots, senior policy advisor with the Treasury Board. “That’s especially true for management consulting firms that provide a very wide range of services to government departments.”
“It’s hard to tell what work was involved let alone how successfully the contract turned out,” said Mr. Boots, adding that the Treasury Board knew of several instances where consultants were hired to check the work of other consultants.
One management consulting firm might be hired to oversee the work of another firm for large IT projects, Mr. Boots said, adding that such arrangements “can lead to a set of dynamics where each firm is not necessarily motivated to hold the other to account given their positions will likely be reversed” in the future.
