Last fall, Maine People Before Politics discovered that the Mills Administration, without competitive bidding, gave a multi-million-dollar contract to the international consulting firm McKinsey & Company. That contract is now up to $9.1 million dollars.

Here’s how the Department of Labor justified this extension:

“Even though the number of people filing claims remains high, the Department is better suited to handling the workflow because of increased staffing and the processes established with support from McKinsey. The Department is in the process of designing and implementing improvements to the user interface of the ReEmployME system. While the first stages will be complete by December [2020], the user experience analysis and system modifications will continue into early 2021.”

As we noted last fall, McKinsey’s state contracts have come under scrutiny in Washington state. The consulting firm leveraged its contracts with one state to get contracts in others; for example, McKinsey has no-bid, Coronavirus-related contracts in Massachusetts and New York. But these are also coming under scrutiny.

A ProPublica investigation into McKinsey contracts last year found that as of last summer, the consulting firm had already made more than $100 million from consulting with governments on their COVID response—with “mixed results.” It wasn’t clear at that time what governments have “gotten in return,” the report concluded.

The Wall Street Journal did their own analysis of McKinsey’s and similar multi-million consulting contracts last November. They concluded, “In some cases, states have seen only modest benefits, if any at all, for the extra cost.”

The story revealed these specific concerns with McKinsey’s no-bid contracts in New York and Massachusetts:

“New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office awarded McKinsey a $9.9 million contract in March to advise the state on issues related to Covid-19 . . .That included 18 weeks of ‘leadership counseling’ at $42,500 a week—the contract didn’t specify who would be counseled, or what that would entail.”

The article continued, “McKinsey also did work for Massachusetts, some of which appeared to involve little more than forwarding others’ material along. Researchers at Harvard University prepared reports for the state’s health department tracking population movements. Consultants at McKinsey used the reports verbatim in material for the governor, according to a person familiar with the work.”

“While the researchers were grateful the governor received the data, they were puzzled why the paid consultants were needed to share data among state officials, this person said. The office of Gov. Charlie Baker didn’t return a request for comment,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Here in Maine, McKinsey’s three no-bid unemployment consulting contracts now total almost $9.1 million, with little evidence of what exactly has been improved.

In fact, Governor Mills makes no recommendations for reforming Maine’s unemployment system in her budget proposals. Although the biennial budget extends the funding for the temporary positions added over the past year to handle the surge in unemployment claims, the Governor proposes a net decrease in permanent staff in the unemployment system from the current fiscal year.

Thousands of Mainers are still waiting weeks and months for their unemployment benefits and to get their questions answered. The Department of Labor’s contract extension with McKinsey does not give any indication of how that contract is improving lives of Maine’s jobless.