Show c I CIGAR FRAUD CHECKED I Under a ruling made several years ago by the then Commissioner of Internal It Inter-nal Revenue the grossest frauds have been practiced by cigar manufacturers man-ufacturers and dealers upon consumers The ruling enabled manufacturers to ship domestic cigars to some neighboring foreign for-eign port where they were reshipped to the United States Passing through the Custom House the boxes were invested with the importers stamp thus enabling dealers to palm off the poorest kind of a domestic article for imported cigars Under the ruling it was not necessary I neces-sary to place upon the boxes the r regular Internal Revenue stamp So the I only extra cost to the shipper was the freight charges which with that i I class of goods were but trifling compared with the cost of the stamps The custom j 4 I house inspectors in such cases were instructed J t in-structed to mark upon the importers stamps Domestic cigars reimported I I j l 1 This was done by writing the I Ji words in ink so that it required 1 an extremely close examination to discover the inscription Not one person in a thousand seeing nn importers stamp I + upon the box would notice the writing or mistrust that the cigar which he purchased I pur-chased was of domestic instead of foreign I i manufacture The fraud has been extensively extens-ively practiced by San Francisco manufacturers manufac-turers who sent their goods to Victoria y British Columbia and then returning them to San Francisco where they were sold to retail dealers in the interior who disposed of them to their customers as imported cigars The ruling under which this fraud was practiced was evidently made in the interest of dishonest manufacturers and retail dealers for it was in gross violation of me latter and spirit of section 2500 of the Revised Statutes upon which it was alleged to have been based Assistant Secretary Maynard has however put a stop to this fraudulent business lie has instructed the customs officers to Bee that domestic cigars exported for the purpose of being reimporled are not admitted to entry under I the above named section of the statutes but to require them to be turned over to the Collectors of Internal Revenue for such procedure as may be found expedient expedi-ent under the internal revenue law The I Instruction is a righteous one or it cer tainly is the duty as it should be tho policy ol the United States Government to prevent by all possible means frauds being practiced under its laws The temporary seizure or rather the I holding of a lot of that description of = cigars sometime agO In Salt Lake City and the correspondence with the Internal Inter-nal Revenue Department relative thereto there-to were probably the means which directed the attention of the Assistant Secretary to the subject and which resulted re-sulted in the issuance of the instructions |