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Ottawa paid nearly $670,000 for KPMG’s advice on cutting consultant costs

The federal government hired KPMG consultants at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars for advice on how to save money on consultants, documents show.

New spending details tabled in Parliament show the department of Natural Resources, led by minister Jonathan Wilkinson, approved $669,650 for KPMG, a global professional services company, to provide managing consulting advice.

The department said this work involved developing “recommendations that could be considered as options to ensure that Canadians’ tax dollars are being used efficiently and being invested in the priorities that matter most to them.”

link: theglobeandmail.com/…/article-federal-government-…

Kecessa , (edited )

What’s frustrating is that, just like most places, they won’t listen to recommendations unless they pay for them, so you’ve got employees with experience telling them “XYZ needs improvements” and they’ll pay a consultant to ask the employees what needs improvements and the consultants then makes a report that will be shelved and never used.

Welcome to any business ever.

porkins , (edited )

True. This happens a lot at my company. The consultants just ask us what we think and that becomes the report.

Uncle_Bagel ,

Started a new job this month and went to my first union meeting last night. A huge part of the arguing the union does with the company is trying to get equipment fixed or upgraded, but the company always puts it off and never does anything. It made me realize that employees actually care about the well being of a company way more than management does everywhere i have ever worked.

porkins ,

Unions can be good as long as there are ground rules to protect the interests of both the company and the employees. Unions can become just as corrupt as companies can. They are just another form of association. In the same way companies are not allowed to monopolize and collude, unions also need to be kept in check, so that they don’t destroy the capitalist system.

sunbrrnslapper ,

They are paying for the ability to scapegoat anything that goes wrong.

Carighan ,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

As crazy as it sounds I can sort-of see the point I suppose.

If you’re trying to cut 15 billion, then paying 0,00045% of that to figure out how to do it doesn’t really feel like such a big waste, even if in absolute numbers it’s still a huge amount.

That being said, fuck HPCs!

FuglyDuck ,
@FuglyDuck@lemmy.world avatar

I mean, for 75k, I’ll send them a great way to save on consultancy costs.

“don’t ask consultants stupid questions.” (oops. I guess i’m out my75k, huh?)

Zoboomafoo ,
@Zoboomafoo@lemmy.world avatar

The sticking point for me is that a consultant should be the last person to ask for advice how to reduce consultant use

syrooks ,

It Is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it

jballs , (edited )
@jballs@sh.itjust.works avatar

As a consultant, I can say this is pretty standard practice. Normal employees typically have way too many day to day responsibilities to take on extra short-term projects. Most businesses have a ton of projects with consultants from a variety of consulting companies. Bringing in consultants for a few weeks to organize info about all the different projects and then present it to stakeholders who actually make the decisions happens all the time.

Edit: What is dumb is to pay consultants to get you an answer that you wanted rather than being objective. I was at a large company once with a new CEO. The CEO was commuting halfway across the country since he didn’t live in the same state as the company headquarters. They brought on consultants for a few weeks to analyze the best location for the company headquarters to be located, and surprise surprise, they recommended the city that the CEO lived in. So they fired most of their workforce and moved the company to the CEO’s city. Like, dude, did you have to spend half a million dollars for that? Actually, in hindsight the shareholders probably wouldn’t have allowed it without first spending all that money for an “objective” recommendation.

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