Nine hundred million euros. That is the amount the French ministries spent in 2021 to hire private consulting firms charged with thinking, organizing, or steering on behalf of the administration. The exact figure, €893.9 million, comes from a Senate inquiry commission that spent four months poring over the state’s invoices. Its report, titled “An Entangled Phenomenon,” was delivered on March 17, 2022. This is not a partisan estimate but a parliamentary tally, built from thousands of documents provided by the administrations themselves.
Key Takeaways
- Consulting invoices surged: from €379.0 million in 2018 to €894.0 million in 2021
- A single consultant day costs €1,528 including taxes, roughly the net monthly salary of a French worker for one day of service
- McKinsey dominates public contracts but purportedly paid no corporate tax for ten years
An Invoice That More Than Doubled in Three Years
In 2018, the ministries spent €379.1 million on consulting services. Three years later, the bill had more than doubled. In 2021, ministry consulting expenditures reached €893.9 million, a clear rise from 2018 (€379.1 million). When including public operators such as Pôle emploi and the Caisse des Dépôts, the total bill surpasses €1 billion. In 2021, government-wide consulting expenditures exceeded €1 billion, of which €893.9 million went to ministries and €171.9 million to a sample of 44 operators. And, the report notes, this total remains a lower bound because operator spending is actually higher; the surveyed sample represented only 10% of total operators.
Concretely, how much does a consultant’s day billed to the state cost? The answer rests on a figure that drew attention during the report’s presentation: the average cost of a consultant’s day was €1,528 including taxes for the 2018-2020 period, according to data provided by the ministries themselves. By comparison, this is roughly the median net monthly salary of a French employee, billed for… a single day of service.
Pensions, Housing Assistance (APL), Vaccination Campaign: McKinsey Everywhere
Among the roughly fifty identified firms, one name keeps recurring: McKinsey. The American strategy consulting giant was mobilized on issues as sensitive as pension reform, the overhaul of personalized housing assistance (APL), and the logistical management of the Covid-19 vaccination campaign. The report notes, for example, nearly €4 million paid to McKinsey for the APL reform alone. During the health crisis, three firms dominated the markets: McKinsey (37.9%), Citwell (20.5%), and Accenture (16.1%) accounted for about three-quarters of epidemic-management consulting expenditures.
The mechanism enabling this rise in influence has a technical name: interministerial framework agreements. Driven by bodies such as UGAP (Union of Public Purchasing Groups) or the DITP (Interministerial Directorate for Public Transformation), they allow each ministry to quickly order strategy, organizational, or IT services without going through a traditional tender. A system designed for flexibility, but one that ended up turning some firms into nearly permanent suppliers to the state, without transferring real competencies to civil servants. The paradox is clear: we pay consultants to fill an internal resource gap, yet each assignment ends and the know-how leaves with them.
Zero Corporate Tax for Ten Years
The fiscal aspect of the report drew as much attention as the spending figures. Senators highlighted that McKinsey paid no corporate income tax in France between 2011 and 2020, despite substantial revenue. The senators pointed to the American firm McKinsey, which allegedly did not pay corporate tax over a ten-year period despite €329 million in declared revenue in France, with tax optimization allegedly routed through its Delaware-based parent company. The firm defended itself by citing different figures: it claimed to have paid €422 million in taxes and social contributions in France, without specifying whether that amount included corporate income tax.
This finding triggered concrete legal steps. The national financial prosecutor’s office announced the opening of an investigation for aggravated tax fraud money-laundering, without naming any particular company but targeting the tax practices of consulting firms as a whole. A search even took place at the firm’s Paris headquarters in December 2022, confirmed by McKinsey itself. The case, unfolding during the 2022 presidential campaign, became a political symbol, McKinsey becoming the name everyone remembered while the firm itself insisted that it accounted for only a marginal fraction of the state’s total consulting expenditures.
Nineteen Proposals, and What Comes Next?
In response to this assessment, the inquiry committee did not merely point to a financial issue. It warned of a risk of structural dependence of the administration on the private sector, and of the real influence these firms exercise over public decision-making by prioritizing certain scenarios over others. The report puts forward nineteen proposals, including publishing the list of consulting services ordered by the state and its operators, systematically examining those exceeding €150,000, and banning pro bono services.
Some months after the report’s publication, the Cour des Comptes revisited the issue and confirmed the scale of the amounts spent, while calling for even stricter oversight in turn. This doubling of spending in three years raises a simple question, rarely posed so directly in a parliamentary report: by continually outsourcing strategic thinking, does the state still possess internal capabilities to function without these firms someday, or is it building its own dependence?
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Sources: senat.fr | mckinsey.com | assemblee-nationale.fr
