German Group Decries Public Spending

Whether it was laser light and intergalactic roller coasters at Bremen's now bankrupt space park (€197 million or $243 million), a multicultural center turned disco temple in Halle (€4.6 million) or €46 million companies waste jumping though bureaucratic hoops each year, the German Taxpayer Association brought these and other cases of squandered money -- totaling €30 billion, about 5 percent of all money the state spends -- to light in a press conference Tuesday.

A road that leads nowhere, a bus stop on a street with no bus lines and military jets the army doesn't need are among the 111 cases of money being thrown out the window that fill the 32ned edition of the association's "black book."

The fact that no one in the town of Hagen realized there was €127,000 worth of marriage license fees sitting in a desk drawer instead of a bank account earning interest wasn't one of the book's major finds, but a typical example for how money is wasted.

"There's an incredible thoughtlessness, a hey-it's-not-my-money mentality," said association president Karl Heinz Däke, who also called for creating new ways to prosecute civil servants caught wasting money.

"There is a system of collective irresponsibility," he said.

Plenty of ways to waste money

Another case mentioned in the book was German TV, a pay-per-view German language service shown in the United States that cost the government €20 million. It's having difficulty finding subscribers and the Taxpayer Association believes it won't last much longer. German TV is a joint project of German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF and Deutsche Welle.

Then there's the rider-information system. After investing €5.2 million, the system should have informed bus riders about delays and cancellations via a satellite system, but software problems kept the users from being able to use the information panels.

Project overruns resulted in many expensive mistakes, the association said -- such as the German Labor Office's virtual job market, which cost €33 million more than the €65 million set aside for the project. Construction delays and design changes for a police headquaters in Frankfurt cost the state €38 million because there were no finished plans when building began in 1998.

Dieter Ondracek, head of Germany's Tax Union, said he doubted the veracity of the book's figures after errors were found in last year's edition and labor unions called the book's figures, which the association bases on official calculations as well as media reports, exaggerated.