I’ll tell you about the circus of advice to the European Commission
The article by Giuseppe Liturri
The echo of the disappearance of text messages between President Ursula Von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has not yet died out.
In short, a Marchese del Grillo in a modern sauce.
This time the accusation is not launched by the Ombudsman, but by an even more authoritative body: the European Court of Auditors, which on Thursday published the outcome of a check it conducted on external consultants used by the EU Commission with results that make the whole procedure that starts from the decision to entrust the consultancies, passes through their material execution and ends with the accounting and payment, look like a sieve.
We are talking about an annual expenditure of about one billion, which in the three-year period 2017-2019 examined was allocated to consulting, study, evaluation or research services.
Gaps emerge in all areas under investigation.
1) Who, when and, above all, how decides to make use of external consultants? You travel in the widest discretion. In fact, there is no complete picture of the ways in which these resources are activated, which should be additional to internal staff. The European auditors note that there are no guidelines on when and how to use those services, there are no preventive cost-benefit analyzes with respect to the alternative use of internal resources. We proceed on sight and, we add, it is not difficult to imagine the space that could open up for favored assignments and opaque situations.
2) It emerges that the largest consulting companies now live permanently at Palazzo Berlaymont. In fact, it is emphasized that the risk of concentration and addiction is very high. There are consultants who win the same contracts every year and the procedures to prevent conflicts of interest are purely formal. In short, it is the Bengodi for the usual dozen large international companies that always find a project to work on. The potential conflicts of interest that could arise when working on certain projects in which the consultants' private clients are also interested remain an uncharted land.
3) Once the consultancy project was assigned, it emerged that the outcome of these activities is not subjected to performance evaluation or ex post cost-benefit evaluation. You take the content of the consultants' work out of the blue. There is no sharing and transfer in favor of internal staff. They sing it and they play it.
4) For those wishing to extricate themselves from the just under 3000 contracts stipulated in the three years and find out more, the operation is practically impossible. In fact, the reporting of these services is lacking and there is no single database to draw on. Lack of transparency is the only rule in force.
The tragicomic aspect of all this is that the Commission has responded to the observations and criticisms of the auditors and has practically agreed with them across the board, promising to take the necessary remedies by December 2023.
In the meantime, a dozen companies (which could reasonably have private clients very interested in the Commission's projects) continue to do good and bad weather in the Brussels offices and produce documentation that few will read, even fewer will understand, but which will inevitably influence political choices that will then have irreversible effects on our daily life.
Bureaucrats who use technicians, but then end up depending on them, in a deadly vicious circle.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/vi-racconto-il-circo-delle-consulenze-alla-commissione-europea/ on Sun, 17 Jul 2022 05:42:21 +0000.