The price tag paid for the (flawed and slanted) Freeh report has bugged me ever since it came out, and I just have to get this off my chest. Feel free to challenge my assumptions, or provide your own scenario.

The report took six months to create, and cost about $6.5M. That works out to about $1.08M per month. I've assumed an average of 21 work days per month (i.e., no weekend or holiday work), which yields a per-day income of $51,587.

Picking arbitrary numbers, I'm guessing that the worker bees amounted to about 20 investigators/writers/e-mail readers. I figured they were paid, on average, about $80,000 annually, or about $40 an hour. Add in 25% for benefits, and they each cost Freeh about $50/hour, or $400 a day. If my staffing guess is close, labor cost him about $8000 a day.

I went on to assume that, at any given time, ten of those folks were working in State College, racking up about $200 each per day for hotel/meals/etc. That's another $2000 daily expense.

I figure the Freeh company has some fancy headquarters somewhere, so allowed them $10,000 a day in overhead expenses such as rent, IT, and the like. (This is a partial share -- presumably his company is working on other projects, which carry their share of overhead.)

Add all the expenses, and it looks like about $20,000 a day. Now, go back and look at their daily income: $51,587. If this scenario is anywhere near correct, Freeh and his cohort made over $31,000 PER DAY from Penn State.

That's a mighty expensive "golden shower" (urolagnia for you educated types) raining down on our institution and reputation.

Feel free to offer alternative analyses.