Federal managers spent nearly $700,000 on consultants to receive advice on reducing costs related to hiring consultants.“This is about smarter, not smaller government,” said Treasury Board President Anita Anand.According to Blacklock’s Reporter, consultants were hired as part of a cabinet commitment to identify $15 billion in federal cost savings. As revealed in an Inquiry of Ministry presented in the House of Commons, Cabinet members disclosed that KPMG received $669,650 for providing advice.The department of Natural Resources hired KPMG “to develop recommendations that could be considered as options to ensure Canadians’ tax dollars are being used efficiently and being invested in the priorities that matter most to them,” said the Inquiry.The disclosure was made at the request of New Democrat MP Gord Johns (Courtenay-Alberni, BC), who asked “With regard to the President of the Treasury Board’s directive to find specific cuts within the departments, were any third-party management firms contracted to assist with identifying spending cuts?”President Anand wrote in the Inquiry “This is not about doing more with less or arbitrary cost-cutting. 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 towards priorities,” wrote Anand. “Savings from under-utilized government spending will be shifted to priorities like healthcare and the clean economy. This is about smarter, not smaller, government.”Cabinet's March 28 budget A Made in Canada Plan said it would “reduce spending on consulting.” It did not elaborate.“The exercise is extremely important,” Anand told reporters on August 22. “Spending reviews have been part of previous governments, but what we are asking departments across the government to do is to take a look at your expenditures and determine where there is a possibility to refocus that spending.”Witnesses earlier told a January 30 hearing of the Commons Government Operations committee that spending on consultants was uncontrolled. “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 or not,” said Boots. The Treasury Board knew of numerous cases where consultants were hired to check the work of other consultants, he added.“Especially for large IT projects, one management consulting firm might be hired to oversee the work of another management consulting firm,” said Boots.“That 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 on other future projects.”
