The UK government has awarded more than a dozen Brexit-related contracts to some of the world’s biggest consultancy firms, records disclosed under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act show.

The information, which was released to BuzzFeed News following FOI requests submitted across Whitehall, reveals that the government as a whole could spend up to £40 million on external consultants, who are providing advice and services to support the delivery of Britain’s departure from the European Union. More is likely be spent in the future on work around implementation and delivery.

Among the government departments that shared data, the Home Office has signed the highest value of contracts. The department has awarded contracts that could see it spend as much as £22 million on consultants, mostly to develop and promote a new settled status scheme that Theresa May’s government hopes will provide a stable framework for EU nationals living in the UK after Britain leaves the union in March 2019.

The Home Office has agreed contracts with, among others, Deloitte and the WorldReach Software Corporation, valued at £1 million–£5 million each, to respectively develop and deliver the application process for the settlement scheme, and provide remote identification and document verification services to support the project. About an additional £2 million is being spent with Accenture on a caseworking solution, and with PwC to promote the scheme.

The amount the department will spend on these contracts will fall within the range of the contracts’ value, an FOI officer explained in an email, adding that the department could not provide its total spend to date because locating and retrieving the data would take too long, exceeding FOI cost limits.

A contract’s value indicates the maximum set aside for that piece of work. Information provided to BuzzFeed News by other departments relating to already-completed Brexit-related consultancy work shows the final spend on contracts often falling closer to the higher end of the value range. For example, the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) has so far paid £1.7 million to the Boston Consulting Group on a contract valued at £2 million.

The Home Office has also entered into contracts with Ernst & Young — to provide support for a commercial portfolio office tasked with analysing the commercial impact of Brexit — and with BJSS, an IT consultancy company, “to develop custom integration work across systems for a digital end-to-end process.” Both deals are valued at £1 million–£5 million.

The Home Office declined to comment further on the figures and its expenditure to date against the value of its Brexit contracts.

Instead, in a response coordinated across Whitehall, a government spokesperson said: “It is standard for government departments to draw on the advice of external specialists. The Brexit negotiations are a priority for the government and we will continue to bring in expertise from outside as appropriate.”

“We do not recognise the figures put forward as they conflate actual spend with contract values,” the spokesperson added.

However, BuzzFeed News put the government’s own numbers to various departments, and indicated details of contract values, dates, and actual spend sourced from FOI responses, as well as publicly available annual accounts and transparency data, which lists government expenditure over £25,000.

A Whitehall source explained that discrepancies across different sets of spending figures are likely due to each department’s accounting methods, including when contracts are referenced in annual accounts.