France’s Cour des Comptes Spotlights Costly Gaffes, Excesses of Government : Government: The watchdog agency uncovers private docks, junkets to China and other expensive boondoggles.

The private boat dock and two Seine River ferries for Minister of Finance Pierre Beregovoy and his staff were ruled a little excessive, particularly in these times of recession and fiscal austerity.

A group voyage to China by practically every elected official (as well as their wives and friends) in Yvelines, a suburban region of Paris, was determined to have crossed the boundaries of public responsibility. So was using money allocated for deer food in a Pyrenees Mountain national park to buy furniture for the park staff.

Likewise, the underwater observatory installed in the small Mediterranean community of Fleury d’Aude was found lacking in vision, since the water surrounding the $900,000 facility is too murky to see anything.

All these examples of government folly and fiscal mismanagement were rendered this week in the annual report of the Cour des Comptes (Revenue Court), the special French watchdog agency that monitors spending by the government and state industries.

The language of the solemn Cour des Comptes report will never rival Racine or Moliere. “These actions have not always been accompanied by strict management,” the court reported in typical understatement regarding the Pyrenees deer-food episode.

But the report’s release each June offers a rare peek inside a political system that operates generally outside public scrutiny. France has few of the open-records laws and Freedom of Information statutes found in the United States, Britain and other Western democracies.

In this regard, the investigating auditors and magistrates of the Cour des Comptes are the eyes of the people, chosen for their intelligence and integrity. Most often, they are top graduates of the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration. To guarantee their independence, appointments and salaries of court members are guaranteed for life.

The Cour des Comptes was created by Napoleon I in 1807. But the tradition of an independent audit of public finances dates to the reign of Philippe V in 1318.

French law grants members of the court nearly unlimited access to fiscal records of all state entities, including ministries of government, banks and nationalized industries. In cases of criminal wrongdoing, the court reports directly to the minister of justice.

Not surprisingly, the annual report is eagerly awaited by French historians and journalists, who use the findings to publish lists of the worst transgressors among France’s public servants caught serving themselves.

“The republic has its rites,” commented Laurent Mauduit, a journalist with the Paris newspaper Liberation. “The publication of the traditional report of the Cour des Comptes is one of them, an altogether strange one.

“Every year at the same time, this noble institution lets out its hilarious findings on all the breakdowns in government: money thrown out the windows by bureaucrats with little concern for their public, the magnificent folly of those who govern us. It’s a little bit like the Middle Ages principle of the carnival--an ephemeral social inversion when the yokels can laugh at the caprices of the princes and their henchmen.”

This year, even the offices of French President Francois Mitterrand and Prime Minister Edith Cresson were touched by the report.

TOO MUCH BUILDING: Mitterrand was criticized for huge cost overruns experienced by the monumental Arche de la Defense building in the cluster of skyscrapers to the west of Paris.

Designed by Danish architect Johan Otto Von Sprecklesen, the soaring stone-and-marble arch--directly aligned with the Arc de Triomphe and the pyramid entrance to the Louvre Museum along the central artery of Paris--was chosen by Mitterrand to be the centerpiece of the 1989 celebrations for the bicentennial of the French Revolution. President Bush and other leaders in the Group of Seven industrial nations held their summit that summer in the building.

The problem is that the structure, which was only partially completed at the time of the Paris summit, was supposed to cost the equivalent of about $200 million when it was proposed. The latest estimates are closer to $400 million. At the time of its conception, government investment in the building was justified as the eventual location of offices of public agencies. But so far, no such offices have come. The government has been forced to sell office space at a loss estimated in the tens of millions of dollars.

TOO MUCH TRAVEL: Although she escaped personal criticism, Cresson’s office was tainted by a Cour des Comptes chapter on the government business activities of her longtime senior adviser, Abel Farnoux, currently special counselor to the prime minister.

In 1983, Farnoux persuaded the Socialist government to grant his company, F-Tec, the equivalent of $10 million to promote the sale of French electronic products on the American market. According to the Revenue Court, Farnoux and his company, despite extensive travel in the United States, sold less than $2 million worth of French goods in five years. “A setback in which the financial consequences are heavy,” the court reported somberly.

The revelations are not expected to help the new prime minister, who has one of the lowest approval ratings in history, as she attempts to deal with growing unemployment and a faltering economy.

TOO MANY PERKS: Perhaps most embarrassed by riches dispensed in his name was Minister of Finance Beregovoy. Not only did his futuristic new offices at Bercy on the Seine cost twice as much as anticipated ($1.2 billion compared to an estimated $550 million), but the Cour des Comptes also ruled that the Finance Ministry had gone overboard by adding a private boat dock ($800,000) and two riverboats ($600,000) for the minister’s use.

Beregovoy is the country’s main public preacher for austerity in government spending. Perhaps because of that, the Revenue Court balked at the $10-million bill to decorate and furnish the new ministry building.

In one of the few flourishes of language in the lengthy document, the court sniffed at the Finance Ministry’s purchase of “a sculpture originally destined for the court of honor of the minister, at a cost of nearly 1.2 million francs ($200,000), that was relegated to the basement because its symbolic aspect was found displeasing.”

The sculpture was of two giant gold ingots.