When Accenture Australia chief executive Peter Burns appeared before a Senate committee in September 2023, he made a striking admission. The global consulting giant, Burns told the committee, routinely engages in “power mapping” – systematically charting who holds influence inside Commonwealth government departments, how public officials relate to one another, and how they view Accenture itself. Burns presented the practice as a standard client engagement tool, used to better understand organizational structures and help government agencies implement change.
“Power maps are one element in our assessment of potential client projects and are used on most of our client engagements, including with our public service clients, and as part of our account planning processes,” Burns told the committee. The disclosure offered a rare glimpse into the mechanics of influence at the heart of Australia’s consulting economy.
According to contracts listed on AusTender, the federal government’s procurement transparency platform, nine major consulting firms have collectively shared in $17.6 billion worth of federal government contracts since 2013, while simultaneously building sophisticated internal intelligence about the bureaucracies that hire them. These firms include KPMG, Deloitte, EY, PwC, Capgemini, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, Accenture, and Scyne Advisory, which was started after PwC was banned from government work following the company’s tax leaks scandal.
Accenture’s Dominance in the Consulting Sphere
Within this crowded and lucrative space, however, one firm stands apart: Accenture. Since 2013, Accenture has secured contracts worth $6.5 billion, dwarfing its competitors and cementing its position as the Commonwealth’s most deeply embedded external advisers.
“Society pays a price for the Commonwealth’s love affair with these multinational consultancies, where everyone’s at the champagne bar congratulating each other on the extraordinary profits they’re making,” says one Canberra insider who has been involved in several major consulting deals inked by Commonwealth agencies, including Services Australia and the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing.
“You have to understand how these firms work. They are staffed by people utterly in mammon’s thrall, where the only metric that matters is profit and how much cash you can funnel into the firm’s coffers,” the source tells The Saturday Paper. “Actual service delivery has very little to do with it. Designing a flawed product is often better – because it means you can stay around forever billing the client while ‘trying to fix’ the problem.”
As consulting firms have expanded their footprint across the federal government, winning increasingly large and complex contracts, questions are growing about whether this deep familiarity with the inner workings of government is delivering value for money for taxpayers – or whether it has helped entrench a system in which private consultants have become indispensable to the agencies meant to oversee them.
The Broader Context: A Shift in Government Reliance
Over the past 13 years, the Australian Public Service’s reliance on private consulting firms has expanded dramatically, reshaping how policy is designed, how programs are delivered, and how public money is spent. The scale of this work spans digital transformation projects, program delivery, IT infrastructure, and policy implementation – functions once routinely performed within the public service itself.
Departments facing growing program complexity, workforce caps, and widening digital capability gaps have increasingly turned to external contractors, often at premium costs. The result has been a steady transfer of both expertise and institutional memory out of government and into private firms whose commercial success depends on winning repeat engagements.
That reliance has come under intense scrutiny in recent years, particularly following the 2022 scandal that engulfed PwC Australia and triggered the most significant reputational crisis faced by the consulting industry in this country. The crisis was driven by the so-called tax leaks scandal that erupted after it emerged a senior PwC partner, Peter-John Collins, had improperly shared confidential Treasury information relating to multinational tax avoidance laws with colleagues and clients seeking to minimize their tax exposure.
Reforming the Consulting Landscape
The expanding role of consulting firms has also triggered alarm inside government. In responding to a parliamentary inquiry into ethics and accountability in the consulting industry, the Commonwealth conceded the need to strengthen oversight of external advisers and has introduced a Supplier Code of Conduct requiring contractors to mirror Australian Public Service values while delivering government work.
Following the PwC scandal, the Albanese government also launched reviews into conflicts of interest, transparency failures, and governance risks across the consulting sector – tacit acknowledgment that private contractors now exercise influence once confined to the public service itself.
“When business meets social policy, sometimes it’s like oil and water,” says New South Wales Labor Senator Deborah O’Neill, who has spearheaded parliamentary scrutiny of the consulting industry following the PwC tax leaks scandal.
O’Neill cites reforms introduced by the Albanese government designed to progressively reduce the Commonwealth’s dependence on external consultants, including the establishment of an in-house agency providing consulting capability across government. “There is no more sleepwalking about the engagement of these entities anymore,” the senator says.
Accenture’s Role in Aged Care Overhaul
Against this backdrop, Accenture’s rise as the single largest recipient of federal government consulting contracts illustrates both the scale of the Commonwealth’s reliance on external expertise and the growing concentration of influence among a small group of multinational firms. Nowhere is the Commonwealth’s dependence on external consulting expertise more visible than in the government’s sweeping overhaul of aged care – a reform program born out of the damning findings of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, which delivered its final report in March 2021.
At the center of that transformation sits Accenture’s largest active federal contract, a technology overhaul that is rapidly approaching $600 million in value and that has become the cornerstone of the government’s $1.4 billion effort to rebuild Australia’s aged-care digital infrastructure. Under the arrangement, Accenture is being paid to supply IT contractors and digital delivery capability to design and implement the systems intended to support new regulatory frameworks, provider reporting requirements, and data-sharing platforms across the aged-care sector.
The deal, first signed in 2024, was extended last month by a further $332 million, lifting the total contract value to $591.5 million. Spread across the life of the agreement, the contract equates to almost $580,000 per working day over four years.
The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing has framed the arrangement as a temporary but necessary expansion of capability, describing the contract as supporting “the temporary demands of reform initiatives while ensuring the ongoing capability and capacity to maintain the future aged care digital ecosystem is retained in the department’s permanent workforce”.
The technology overhaul is intended to deliver the infrastructure required to implement the royal commission’s recommendations for higher quality and better coordinated care. Central to that effort is the creation of integrated digital platforms designed to connect providers, regulators, and patients through new compliance, funding, and care management systems.
Accenture’s involvement in the aged-care overhaul extends beyond the main contractor arrangement. The firm has already built one of the program’s key platforms, the troubled Government Provider Management System, or GPMS – a Salesforce-based system designed to streamline provider oversight and reporting. Its budget blowouts are emblematic of the cost and delivery risks that often accompany large-scale government technology projects.
Initially awarded as an $18 million contract, the system expanded rapidly through successive contract amendments to reach $139 million within 18 months. The project has generated a further $75 million in licensing and services payments to Salesforce under separate agreements.
Despite that heavy investment, the rollout of the broader aged-care reform agenda has already been delayed, with the government acknowledging that elements of the supporting technology infrastructure were not ready for implementation. Transparency around the overhaul has also drawn criticism. The Albanese government has refused Senate orders requiring it to release key documentation relating to the aged-care technology build, including tender evaluation reports, internal reviews, and ministerial briefings. Effectively, it is shielding major aspects of the project’s governance and performance from parliamentary scrutiny.
Unlike many other government IT projects, the systems being built are not merely administrative tools. They are intended to underpin one of the most politically sensitive and socially consequential policy reforms in recent decades – a redesign of how Australia regulates, funds, and monitors care for hundreds of thousands of older Australians.
Even as scrutiny of the consulting sector has intensified following the PwC scandal, Accenture continues to expand its footprint across government. In addition to its aged-care work, the firm recently secured a further $30 million contract with the Australian Electoral Commission to build a national platform designed to disclose political donations in near-real time.
Challenges with the Integrated Assessment Tool
While the aged-care technology overhaul has relied heavily on Accenture, another major element of the system redesign has exposed deeper implementation problems – this time in the assessment of individuals’ care needs. Central to this controversy is the Integrated Assessment Tool (IAT), designed by KPMG and PwC. The tool is an algorithm-based instrument, introduced as part of the Commonwealth’s “Single Assessment System”, intended to standardize and streamline how older Australians’ care needs are evaluated.
The IAT was intended to replace a patchwork of assessment forms with a single digital process that produces a clinical needs rating based on a standardized set of questions and responses. In theory, the tool was meant to improve consistency, reduce bias, and ensure that older people only have to tell their story once.
After the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing engaged KPMG and PwC to design the IAT and to steer its development, these same consultants were then employed to review the tool, and later to test it, with little apparent separation between design, evaluation, and validation stages. Critics say that approach undermined basic principles of independent testing and quality assurance.
That concern is not merely theoretical. Submissions from aged-care providers to a Senate inquiry into the Transition of the Commonwealth Home Support Program to the Support at Home Program describe a sharp decline in the acceptance of assessment outcomes after the IAT’s introduction. Aged-care providers have also expressed concerns over the fact the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing has restricted human assessors from overriding the algorithm’s determinations, even in cases where those decisions appear to be plainly wrong.
In effect, the Commonwealth elevated the IAT’s automatic outputs above clinical judgment – a decision critics say turns what should be a supportive decision-aiding tool into an opaque “black box” whose internal logic cannot be scrutinized or corrected by trained professionals.
“Aged-care reform is an absolute shitshow and a big chunk of it is just this unremitting public service love affair with multinational consultancies bleeding out every IT project they touch,” says a Canberra-based IT contractor. “And why wouldn’t they? Because that is the whole imperative of these firms.”
The rise of consulting firms across the Commonwealth reflects more than a shift in how governments buy expertise. It reflects a gradual transfer of institutional knowledge, policy design, and delivery capability out of the public service and into private hands. As that transfer accelerates, the question confronting government is no longer how much the Commonwealth spends on consultants but, rather, how much governing capacity it is willing to give away.
In a response to a series of questions submitted by The Saturday Paper, an Accenture spokesperson provided the following statement: “Accenture has a long and established track record of delivering high quality work in both the public and private sectors in Australia. Our work for the Australian Government and its agencies is properly and fairly awarded to us as per the Commonwealth Procurement Rules, and our performance is subject to relevant reviews and audits.”
