Louvre Laziness Enough to Put Scowl on Mona Lisa

Inefficiency, mismanagement and three-hour coffee breaks are ruining the Louvre experience for millions of visitors, according to a damning annual report by France's government auditors.

The famed museum, home of the Mona Lisa, does not know how many paintings it has, how many staff it employs, or how much time they spend on the job, the report says.

It blames the mess on the fact that two-thirds of the 1,800 staff are civil servants. It says the museum is strapped for cash because the state takes nearly half its earnings.

The 6m people who visited the museum in 2000, most of them foreign tourists, had first to overcome "very worrying deficiencies" at the ticket and information counters, the report says, noting that the staff routinely take coffee breaks totalling between 2 and 3 hours a day.

Visitors are unlikely to see the whole museum, not just because it is so enormous, but because it is never fully open. Up to 25% of the exhibition rooms were closed to the public in 2000 because of a shortage of security staff.

Those security staff that are on duty are more of a liability than an asset, the report says: a security guard was sacked when a Corot painting was stolen in 1998, but it took him more than two years to return his keys and move out of the rent-free flat the museum had given him.

Nor, if a work does get stolen, is the Louvre necessarily likely to know about it. It has still not got around to making a complete inventory of them.