Of all the facts about the Mirrlees review into the tax system, the cost of the project was the one TS found most intriguing. The whole shebang is to cost £625,000, the Insititute for Fiscal Studies, launching the review, said. Is that all? By TS’s count, there are 50 different people working on the reviews, including nobel laureates, alongside current and former Big Four partners. ‘Academics work for rather less than we do,’ notes one Big Four partner not involved with the review. You can say that again. According to the court documents of Ken McFarlane’s divorce case, he was being paid over a million pounds a year as a tax partner at Deloitte. The academics will be working for somewhat less than that. Are they all working for free, we wonder?