The Augusta Courier

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GEORGIA'S $64 QUESTION IS WHO HAS BEEN STEALING WHISKEY STAMPS OUT OF STATE REVENUE DEPARTMENT

Inability To Cope With Smugglers, Moonshiners Losing Millions In Taxes

The sixty-four dollar question in the State Revenue Department is who has been stealing liquor stamps.

All legal liquor sold in Georgia must have a State stamp on each bottle to the tune of a dollar a gallon. Then the liquor must come into the State through a State warehouse and pay a warehouse charge of four dollars a gallon.

That is legal liquor. Illegal liquor creeps over the border in the dead of night and during the hours of the day when no one is watching.

It is not necessary for this illegal smuggled liquor to have either State stamps on the bottles or to pay the warehouse charges. When smuggled liquor comes into the State illegally it can and usually does come in escaping the 4 dollar a gallon. warehouse charge and the one dollar a gallon tax.

But the mystery of recent months is that most of this smuggled liquor has been coming into the State with state stamps attached and affixed to each bottle just as completely as if it had come in legally.

Now the question is where do the smugglers get the State stamps?

There are only two sources from which the stamps can be obtained. These two sources are the State Revenue Department itself and the printing office of the printer who prints these stamps. They must come from one of these two sources and they must be stolen.

The smugglers have been able to obtain all of the State stamps they seem to need. Where they have been getting them nobody knows. But they have to come from someone in the Revenue Department or someone in the printing office.

The stamps have not been paid for. They have been stolen.

Some of this liquor has been seized by the Revenue Department and the stamps have been checked. Some of the officials in the Revenue Department advise us that these stamps are State stamps and are not counterfeits.

These officials are just as ignorant as we are as to how these State Stamps get into the hands of smugglers. They admit that there are only two sources.

They must be stolen from the Revenue Department or the printer.

The Revenue Department has a complete record and should be able to determine whether they are stolen from them or not. If they are not stolen from the Revenue Department they must get into the hands of the smugglers from the printers themselves.

The game is still going on. The Revenue agents say that they are state stamps.

However, in recent months the stealing of state stamps has slowed down and the
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Inability To Cope With Smugglers, Moonshiners Losing Millions In Taxes

(Continued from page 1) smugglers are now having State stamps counterfeited and printed by a printer in the State of New Jersey. But the racket of stealing and counterfeiting State stamps is still going on. It mystifies and puzzles State Revenue officials and they seem not to know what to do to stop it. The Courier has attempted to check with nearly every wholesale liquor dealer in Georgia and a lot of retailers. The Courier has interviewed officials in the Revenue Department and revenue agents out in the field. From the information furnished us by these dealers, by the revenue agents and by some bootleggers who have been contacted we have reached the conclusion that there is as much illegal government liquor sold in Georgia as legal liquor. This does not take into account the amount of moonshine liquor made and bottled in Georgia. Moonshine liquor itself runs into million dollar businesses in various sections of Georgia. Smuggling and bootlegging keeps growing by leaps and bounds and the sale of legal liquor continues to decline. Georgia is now leading the nation in the moonshining, bootlegging and smuggling of liquor. And yet the Revenue Department seems to be helpless and cannot fix responsibility for the stealing of the revenue stamps. The stealing of revenue stamps can be stopped by the Revenue Department by maintaining an accurate check of the revenue stamps in the department and the securing of a responsible printer who will not permit the stamps to be stolen from his place of business.