EUROPE
CONSULTANCIES POCKETING EU MILLIONS PROMPTS MEP GRILLING

Frida Qi
November 29, 2021

MEP price range sleuths will on 6 December grill the European Fee for handing out increasingly-lucrative contracts, value tons of of millions of euros, to giant consultancy companies.

Amongst these are PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), KPMG, Deloitte and EY – also referred to as the ‘Large 4’.

Collectively, they’ve landed over €462 million in contracts between 2016 and 2019, in keeping with a report earlier this 12 months by the Brussels-based Euractiv media outlet.

Monika Hohlmeier, a German centre-right MEP, chairs the parliament’s budgetary management committee.

“Requesting consulting services by external parties is not a problem per se as not all knowledge is available within the EU institutions,” she mentioned in an e mail on Friday (26 November).

“However, the significant increase and the unusual concentration on the so-called Big Four require some explanation by the Commission,” she mentioned.

The committee plans on asking government vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis what sort of providers the fee had requested and for what function.

In addition they wish to understand how they assess outcomes delivered.

MEPs earlier this 12 months demanded responses in a letter addressed to each European Fee president Ursula von der Leyen and Dombrovskis.

They highlighted attainable conflicts of curiosity given the Large 4 have been more and more coping with the fee’s structural reform help programme.

The programme gives EU states technical help relating to designing public coverage in areas just like the labour market, police, healthcare or social providers.

PWC, as an example, has been concerned within the Belgian nationwide tax management framework as a part of the co-operative tax compliance reform.

On the identical time, they word that PWC delivered coaching and a guidebook for Belgium’s ‘extra revenue’ tax scheme, a scheme thought-about by the fee as an unlawful state assist.

“It is also public knowledge that PwC and the three other consultancy giants took an active part in the elaboration of practices helping more than 340 multinationals to circumvent tax legislation, as revealed by the Luxleaks scandal,” notes the letter.

The structural reform help programme has since been changed by the so-called “technical support instrument”.

HALF A BILLION EUROS FOR RESEARCH

The contract figures are discovered within the EU’s monetary transparency system, a web site that gives an in depth breakdown of how EU funds are spent and on what.

For his half, Dombrovskis, in a observe up letter in June, mentioned that the “chosen provider is not responsible for policy-making.”

He additionally famous that the fee had concluded examine contracts to exterior non-public corporations to the tune of €542.4m between 2016 and 2020.

A breakdown of these prices reveals they spent €93.4m in 2016, €97.8m in 2017, €92.2m in 2018, €134m in 2019 and €123m in 2020.

Among the many greatest spenders are the fee’s directorate generals – branches specialised in coverage areas starting from vitality to commerce and improvement.

Join, a DG coping with communications networks, spent €48.9m over these 4 years.

Others coping with improvement spent simply over €40m, whereas well being points in DG Sante spent a lot much less, at €312,000.

In an e mail final week, a European Fee spokesperson mentioned the establishment doesn’t have limitless entry to human assets and so might flip to exterior consultants.

“The use of external knowledge based services has become increasingly important in times of organisational and digital transformation coupled with the constraints on administrative expenditure,” he mentioned.

It’s a service additionally employed by the fee’s personal secretariat-general. It paid Deloitte €394,209 for 3 research in 2019.

Essentially the most-expensive was titled Easing the Administrative Burden and price €165,785. The secretariat basic then demanded one other examine final 12 months from Deloitte for €87,947.

Different research value significantly extra.

The identical agency final 12 months charged €994,738 to evaluate attainable choices for updating an EU regulation on office security.

“Of course the EU Commission should take in external expertise. But this cannot mean to simply outsource entire lines of work,” mentioned German Inexperienced MEP, Daniel Freund.

“We should have an interest in building up expertise on our own and not to rely on costly consultancies. This would also decrease the risks of potential conflicts of interests when dealing with consultancies.”



Source link