One billion euros. That is the minimum amount the French State paid to private consulting firms during the single year 2021, according to the investigative report of the Senate, released on March 17, 2022. A figure that, in itself, captures the scale of a phenomenon that Senators Arnaud Bazin and Éliane Assassi describe as tentacular. For the ministries alone, the bill reached €893.9 million in 2021, compared with €379 million in 2018. In three years, spending has more than doubled, a rise that the Senate communiqué bluntly confirms: reliance on consultants by the State and its operators accounted for more than €1 billion in 2021, i.e., twice as much as in 2018.
Behind these sums are well-known names in the business world: McKinsey, Capgemini, Accenture, EY, Roland Berger. These firms were called upon for matters as sensitive as the Covid-19 vaccination campaign or pension reform, two initiatives where the State deemed it necessary to rely on external expertise rather than on its own services. The problem isn’t only the amount. It’s what happens once the mission ends.
Key takeaways
- How can the State spend more than a billion without ever owning what it buys?
- A contractual mechanism that obliges the administration to pay again for the same assignments year after year
- McKinsey: zero corporate tax in France despite €329 million in turnover
Millions Spent on Projects with No Lasting Impact
Take the National Old-Age Insurance Fund (CNAV) as an example. In 2019 and 2020, McKinsey intervened at CNAV to prepare the (aborted) pension reform. The convention designed to present the project to the agents, prepared over weeks, was first postponed because of the Yellow Vests movement, then canceled due to the health crisis. The result: deliverables produced by the firms BCG and EY without the reform ever taking shape, and an invoice to be paid nonetheless.
This case illustrates a mechanism the senators took the time to dissect: the near-automatic absence of capitalization of the deliverables and transfer of skills, and the contractual requirements that are difficult to implement in contracts with the firms. Concretely, when a consultant produces a study, an action plan, or a methodology for a ministry, there is no contractual obligation for the firm to transfer its know-how to the public agents who must subsequently carry the file forward. The documents remain the intellectual property of the service provider. The administration pays, receives a report, but never acquires the expertise that made it possible. Yet, a single consultant day costs the State around €1,500, and that rate, repeated across hundreds of missions, alone explains the explosion of the overall bill.
This contractual void has a direct and absurd consequence: the State ends up paying again, year after year, for services that resemble one another, lacking any capitalization on prior work. The report also notes that the administration struggles to evaluate seriously what it purchases. No systematic mechanism allows measuring whether a consulting mission actually transformed a public policy or ended up, like many others, in a drawer. In these conditions, it is hard to justify a expenditure that doubled in three years while citizens, for their part, see local public services being scaled back.
McKinsey, Zero Euros in Corporate Tax for Ten Years
The other explosive aspect of the report concerns McKinsey’s taxation in France. To get to the bottom of the matter, the senators conducted two checks, both document-based and on-site, at the Ministry of the Economy and Finance, focusing on documents from 2011 to 2020 relating to the two main McKinsey entities registered in France. The conclusion, unambiguous: McKinsey is indeed subject to corporate tax in France, but its payments have totaled zero euros for at least ten years, while its turnover on French soil reached €329 million in 2020.
When asked about this point, the American firm defended itself vigorously before the commission, claiming that they pay corporate tax in France and that all salaries are paid by a French-registered entity that pays its taxes in France. A reply that did not convince the senators, numbers in hand. McKinsey subsequently tried to downplay its role in public sector consulting, arguing that the firm accounts for less than 1% of public sector consulting purchases in France. Size, however, does not address the tax question, which remained at the heart of the debates after the report’s publication. The matter even took a judicial turn: the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office opened a preliminary inquiry, and searches were carried out at the firm’s Paris headquarters at the end of 2022.
A Law Passed, Its Implementation Still Incomplete
The report did not remain a dead letter. It led to a cross-party bill proposed in June 2022, with a clearly stated objective by Arnaud Bazin: to put an end to the sweeping recourse to consulting firms and to prevent the misuses observed by the investigative committee—opacity, uncontrolled proliferation of services, and the erosion of the State’s grip on strategic missions. The proposed law includes, notably, the annual publication in open data of the list of consulting services, a ban on contractors using the administration’s logo, and the systematic evaluation of entrusted missions.
The Court of Auditors confirmed the scale of the phenomenon in a July 2023 report, also valuing consulting services at around €890 million in 2021, figures close to those of the Senate. The law governing the intervention of consulting firms was eventually adopted by Parliament, after several back-and-forth exchanges between the National Assembly and the Senate on the exact scope of the administrations concerned, notably whether major local authorities should be subject to it. The question remains whether this new legal framework will be enough to prevent the State from repaying, again and again, for skills that it should, in theory, be able to develop in-house.
Sources: actu-juridique.fr | legifrance.gouv.fr | senat.fr
