consultants
Lynda Loxton
THE government is finding that trying to get to grips with the booming consultancy industry is as difficult as wrestling with an octopus. This emerged in the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee when it considered the special report by Auditor General Henri Kluever on consultancy services.
The committee heard this week that although the regulations covering the hiring of consultants had been beefed up since Kluever released his report, the government was still receiving proposals to appoint consultants at anything between R5 000 and R15 000 day, “which is not acceptable”, Kluever said.
To measure the extent of the problem, his department undertook a snap survey of government departments. State Expenditure Deputy Director General Tobie Verwey said it appeared that the government was employing 2 359 consultants at a cost of about R1- billion this year.
He cautioned, however, that these figures were “very soft” as there appeared to be inconsistencies in figures supplied and replies had not been received from six of the nine provinces, nor from the office of Deputy President Thabo Mbeki.
Most of the consultants were professionals, such as lawyers and architects, who were employed at set rates. But 562, costing more than R230-million, were in the “problem categories” of advisers or information consultants.
There were no professionally set fees for such consultants and they appeared to be asking for what they wanted, no matter what the real value of their services were.
Kluever said there were still no guidelines on acceptable pay levels for consultants and it appeared that no matter how much the regulations might be tightened, “the biggest problem is that they are often ignored”.
In view of the case of Eugene Nyathi earlier this year, who was paid R1 million for two months’ work by the Mpumalanga province, Kluever was also concerned that the regulations did not, in terms of the Constitution, apply to the provinces.
“This is really a serious problem and we can’t walk away from it and just let the provinces do their own thing,” he said.
State Expenditure Director General Hannes Smit said, however, that he was liaising closely with the provinces on how to handle consultants.
He said the major problem was that there was no agreement on the definition of a consultant, “and we are running out of ideas on what a consultant is”.
In the meantime, his department had decided to stick to the definition that consultancies covered “services contracted out and persons contracted in”.
The World Bank, for its part, had said that “advisory and support services are those services that are contractually obtained from non-governmental sources in support of government/departmental policy development, decision-making, management and administration, support and improvement of management systems, and in supervising the execution of government projects”.
African National Congress MP Barbara Hogan said she sympathised with Smit’s dilemma as the word consultancy was being “used very freely these days” and covered not only qualified professionals such as lawyers and engineers, but also human resource consultants, information technology experts and advisers.
The latter were “not necessarily vultures living off the state” and played an important role in helping to improve the capacity of the new government to deliver services.
The problem was that they were not “organised” under professional associations and charged a wide range of fees. The government would have to try to find a way of ensuring some consistency in the fees charged.
Officials said that although tendering procedures had been “sharpened up considerably this year” to ensure some control, not all consultants were employed through the Tender Board.
It was agreed that the answer did not only lie in tighter regulations, but in training to ensure that government officials could better manage their affairs, including the employment of consultants.