With the opposition parties gunning for Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Mary Harney over the disastrous implementation of the PPARS health department payroll system, it was disclosed earlier this month that consultants Deloitte had been paid over €60 million to help sort out the mess.

When it was first costed in 1998, the government believed the implementation would cost no more than €9 million.

How could the government justify such a fee for a task that could conceivably be carried out by civil servants?

Software experts have pointed out that the PPARS system, which is based on platform built by German software house SAP, should not have been considered by the health department in the first place.

SAP, one of the world's most reputable and successful software companies, produces software suited to multi-national companies with offices throughout the world, they say, -- not a centralized government department in a country like Ireland.

As a result serious questions have been raised about just who was advising the department in the early stages of the project.

Ahern last week announced new legislation to curb the use of consultants. The opposition are not convinced.

Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny described the proposals as "consultants reviewing consultants."

Described as a "cross-departmental peer review" system, it aims to cut down on money being paid to consultants.

In a statement, the Department of the Taoiseach said: "The new set of controls decided by the government will ensure that major ICT projects in all areas are managed to best practice standards.

"A new cross-Departmental peer review process is being introduced with immediate effect to existing and new major ICT Projects."

Meanwhile a recent report from the official government watchdog -- the Comptroller and Auditor General -- revealed a loophole that allows consultants to create vast amounts of money from road building projects.

It showed that consultants have benefited handsomely from the unprecedented increase in road building in recent years. Instead of receiving a flat fee for their services, consultants were instead paid a percentage of the project's final overall cost.

Where exactly, asked Fine Gael, was the incentive for consultants to do what they are paid to do -- keep the cost down?

Although the role of consultants has now come under the microscope in Ireland, the broad debate about whether consultants are over-used -- and whether their expertise helps anyone but themselves -- has caused controversy in many other nations, including the United States.

In June, for example, a Congressional investigation found that two-thirds of states pay consultants to help them get more federal Medicaid money. Investigators from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the procedure tended to involve "questionable billing practices" and that the consultants were often paid a share of the money received by the states.

The GAO report, first detailed by the New York Times, also suggested that the use of consultants in this manner was serving to push up Medicaid costs.

The study had been requested by a Republican senator, Charles Grassley of Iowa. Responding to its findings Sen. Grassley e said:

"It's alarming to find that a majority of states use contingency-fee consultants to increase the federal dollars they claim from Medicaid, and that those increases are often achieved through schemes of questionable legality."

The GAO report noted both the increased aid consultants were able to obtain for states and the considerable rewards they received for doing so. Consultants in Georgia were paid $82m for helping the state draw $1.5bn extra in Medicaid money; in Massachusetts, $11m was paid to consultants who helped the state access an additional $570m.

Dr Mark B McClellan, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told the Times in the wake of the report that "the Medicaid program is unquestionably paying for things that it should not be paying for."

The use of consultants has also caused concern within the Tristate area for ethical reasons. Last December, New Jersey's acting governor, Richard Codey signed an executive order aimed at ending the commonplace 'pay to play' phenomenon whereby businesses paid politically-connected consultants as they sought to win state contracts.

Codey said at the time:

"I see real conflict in the fact that some of these third-party consultants are receiving enormous commissions, in some cases a percentage based on the state contract itself, when the consultants are also able to make campaign contributions."