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