The Court of Auditors on Tuesday pinned the government for its recourse “under questionable conditions” to external consultants during the establishment of the Culture Pass, while welcoming the first “encouraging” results of the device. The financial magistrates have published their final observations on the years of implementation of the flagship cultural policy system, wanted by Emmanuel Macron, between 2017 and 2022. It has since been generalized to 15-18 year olds, then extended to classes of 6th and 5th.
Overall, the Court of Auditors considers “encouraging” the first statistics on the use of the Pass Culture. It seems to meet “certain expectations by removing one of the barriers, financial, to access to cultural goods”, she says. However, it draws up “a severe assessment of the prefiguration phase of the device”, in 2017-2018. In particular, the way in which the project was piloted, “in an excessively informal way” through a “State start-up”, which itself called on private service providers and subcontractors. .
However, the Court of Auditors could not “reconstitute the list and the precise functions” of the consultants who worked on the implementation of the pass “only with difficulty”. “The piloting of the Pass Culture, in its first phase, was emblematic of the abuses of the extensive use of external consultants for missions of an administrative and political nature”, she notes.
She dwells, without naming him, on the case of Éric Garandeau, an inspector general of finances and former president of the National Center of Cinema, who for a period was commissioned by Minister Françoise Nyssen as one of the pilots of the implementation of the Culture Pass, while involving his company as a subcontractor. This “responsible and public representative of the project, commissioned by the minister, (…) could have been employed directly under his powers as a public official rather than as a subcontractor of a service provider”, underlines the Court.
Questioned by Mediapart, Éric Garandeau had resigned in November 2019 from his consulting activities with Pass Culture. He has since become director of public affairs for the Chinese social network TikTok. In December 2022, the Culture Pass had 2.6 million young beneficiaries since its launch, allowing them to spend a total of 291 million euros, mainly on books, cinema and musical instruments. It has represented 332 million euros of expenditure for the State since the start.
