Obsolete records burned down Parliament.

From around 1100, the king’s treasury in England recorded money paid to it on tally sticks, an early kind of receipt. The sum was cut into a stick as notches and the stick split lengthwise, so each side kept a half that matched only the other, which made it hard to forge. Paper and double-entry bookkeeping did the job far better, and the sticks had been redundant for centuries by the early 1780s, when reformers asked why they were still being cut.

Parliament abolished the tallies in 1783, but the Act was to take effect only once the last of the officials who kept them had died, which took until 1826. In October 1834 the Treasury told the Clerk of Works to clear out the old sticks, and two labourers spent a day feeding them into the furnaces under the House of Lords. That evening the furnaces overheated and set the building on fire, and by the next morning most of the Houses of Parliament had burned down.

Dickens told the story at a reform meeting in 1855. The sticks could have gone as firewood to the poor who lived round Westminster, he said:

“They never had been useful, and official routine required that they never should be.”

For fifty years nobody was allowed to throw the sticks away. The day someone did, nobody had checked how.

Reports turn into tallies the same way. One is started to watch a problem, the problem gets fixed, and the report goes on, because by then it has recipients and a slot in a meeting, and stopping it would mean someone explaining why that’s safe, which is harder than sending it again. Features and ceremonies go the same way.

Carrying it costs every year

Nobody approves these costs, so nobody adds them up.

• Reading and attending. Every recipient, every time, whether or not the number matters.
• Preparing and running. Someone builds it, sends it, or hosts it every time.
• Explaining. New people are told what it is, and odd numbers get questioned.
• Working around it. Every change elsewhere has to keep it working.
• Tools. Licences, hosting, and maintenance renew every year.
• Wrong decisions. Stale numbers get acted on.

Removing it costs once

Someone investigates and decides, tells the people who receive it, and checks after a trial period that nothing broke. Sometimes it has to come back, and that cost counts too. After that the yearly cost is gone.