The news about Deloitte’s $439,000 report for the federal government containing fabricated academic references and invented legal quotes has been doing my head in all week. Here we have one of the Big Four consulting firms, charging taxpayers nearly half a million dollars, and they can’t even be bothered to check if the sources they’re citing actually exist.

What really gets under my skin isn’t just the sloppiness – it’s what this represents about the entire consulting industry and how governments have become utterly dependent on these firms for basic policy work. Someone in the discussion threads hit the nail on the head when they described it as “decision insurance” – governments aren’t really buying expertise, they’re buying someone to blame when things go wrong.