  We say that a collection $\Cc$ of subsets of $X$ is {\em bureaucratic} if
every maximal hierarchy on $X$ contained in $\Cc$ is also maximum. We
characterise bureaucratic set systems and show how they arise in phylogenetics.
This framework has several useful algorithmic consequences: we generalize some
earlier results and derive a polynomial-time algorithm for a parsimony problem
arising in phylogenetic networks.
