Atf Essay Research Paper ATF stands for — страница 3

  • Просмотров 452
  • Скачиваний 9
  • Размер файла 20
    Кб

commissioner with collection, among others, of taxes on distilled spirits and tobacco products that continue, with amendments, today. Because taxation so often does evoke resistance, including criminal evasion, during 1863 Congress authorized the hiring by Internal Revenue of “three detectives to aid in the prevention, detection and punishment of tax evaders.” Tax collecting and enforcement were now under one roof. Before decade’s end, the Office of Internal Revenue had its own counsel, another component descending in unbroken line to ATF today. In 1875 federal investigators broke up the “Whisky Ring”, an association of grain dealers, politicians and revenue agents that had defrauded the government of millions of dollars in distilled spirits taxes. Responding to the

scandal, Congress undertook the first Civil Service reform acts, acknowledging formally that effectiveness of law depends on the quality of its administrators. The commissioner’s annual report for 1877 refers to his office as the Bureau of Internal Revenue, a title that it retained for the next seventy-five years. In 1886, a single employee from the Department of Agriculture came to the Bureau of Internal Revenue under authority of the Oleomargarine Act to establish a Revenue Laboratory. The first samples received in the laboratory that 29 December were of butter suspected of adulteration with oleomargarine. In its second century, ATF’s laboratory staff includes — but is not limited to — chemists, document analysts, latent print specialists, and firearms and toolmark

examiners, supported by its own highly sophisticated facilities at Rockville, Maryland, Atlanta, Georgia, and Walnut Creek, California. That first chemist would recognize some aspects of laboratory service today (analysis of alcohol and tobacco products, for instance) although tools such as chromatography and electrophoresis might seem magic. There was nothing in 1886 to foreshadow the Laboratory’s sought-after forensic skills in arson, explosives, and criminal-evidence examination, a resource now available to law enforcement personnel worldwide. Ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1919, in combination with the Volstead Prohibition Enforcement Act of that year, brought to prominence those officers — ‘revenoors’ — charged with investigating

criminal violations of the Internal Revenue law, including illicit manufacture of liquors, who coalesced by 1920 into the Prohibition Unit. Evolution of this unit reflects the difficulty of enforcing a nation-wide ban on “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes.” Internal Revenue’s orientation has been toward collection throughout its history. Enforcement efforts, albeit necessary, never came easily. On April Fool’s Day, 1927, Treasury elevated the Prohibition Unit to bureau status within the department. Congress was impatient with the results. On 1 July 1930 Congress created certain confusion for later historians by transferring “the penal provisions of the national prohibition act” from Treasury’s Bureau of Prohibition

(which then ceased to exist) to the Department of Justice’s new Bureau of Prohibition — with an important exception: tax-related and regulatory activities, “the permissive provisions,” remained at Treasury, under a new Bureau of Industrial Alcohol. The most illustrious enforcer during that tumultuous era was Eliot Ness, the “T-man” who toppled Chicago’s organized-crime king Al Capone on tax-evasion charges. The Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution, repealing Prohibition, achieved ratification with unanticipated speed by 5 December 1933, catching Congress in recess. As an interim measure to manage a burgeoning legitimate alcohol industry, by executive order under the National Industrial Recovery Act, President Franklin Roosevelt established the Federal Alcohol

Control Administration (FACA). The FACA, in cooperation with the Departments of Agriculture and Treasury, endeavored to guide wineries and distilleries under a system based on brewers’ voluntary codes of fair competition. The FACA was relieved of its burden — and effectively vanished from history — after just twenty months, when President Roosevelt in August 1935 signed the Federal Alcohol Administration (FAA) Act. The new FAA received a firm departmental assignment: Treasury once more found itself regulating the alcohol industry. Although Prohibition was officially over, the era’s side effects continued for decades to mold the shape of ATF. On 10 March 1934 Justice’s Prohibition enforcement duties folded into the infant Alcohol Tax Unit (ATU), Bureau of Internal