The Australian federal government hired an ethics consultant to advise it on hiring consulting firms after a tax information leak scandal involving PwC.
“It’s like outsourcing your conscience,” said Sen. Barbara Pocock, a member of the left-wing Greens who has been at the forefront of efforts to curb the use of consultants in public service.an Australian satirical TV series about bureaucrats, along the lines of NBC’s “Parks and Recreation.”“Just imagine a bureaucrat in the Department of Finance saying, ‘We need to hire a consultant to advise us on how to hire consultants,’” Pocock said.
The senator raised concerns about the department hiring Scyne in a July letter to Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, a member of the center-left Labor Party, saying that employing consultants from the offshoot company “appears to have the effect of sidestepping accountability.” In her response, which a spokesman for Pocock shared with The Washington Post, Gallagher said that the department had hired Simon Longstaff, a renowned philosopher and chief executive of the Ethics Centre, a not-for-profit organization. Longstaff would assist the government in assessing whether it could “have confidence in any future work [Scyne] delivers,” she wrote, in an apparent attempt to quell Pocock’s concerns.
But the scenario has instead provided another example of what critics say is bureaucratic bloat that enriches consultancies at the expense of public agencies. The Australian government, then under right-wing coalition rule,News of Longstaff’s appointment was“The Government should have a hands on role in managing the procurement of consultant services not relying on third parties to make critical policy decisions,” Pocock wrote.
over its role in the opioid epidemic. Court documents show it had advised opioid-makers to target certain patients. At the same time, it was paid by authorities to advise them on combating the drug crisis.
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