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Ottawa paid nearly $670,000 for KPMG’s advice on cutting consultant costs (www.theglobeandmail.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-federal-government-kpmg-consulting/

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

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?)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.