Couzens' Committee

The Senate Committee investigating the Bureau of Internal Revenue, of which committee Senator Couzens of Michigan is chairman, having last spring made public some 15 volumes of evidence, last week made public a few volumes more. The volumes deal with the technical administration of the income tax unit, and criticize the Treasury's allowance for depreciation, "discovery values" of oil wells, and other technical decisions by which it is claimed that in specific instances the Government lost $5,000,000 in taxes here and $25,000 there, and $10,000,000 somewhere else--with the inference that if these cases show some losses, the entire group of tax collections show much greater losses.

One of the more interesting cases is that of the Gulf Oil Co., in which Secretary Mellon is or was interested. The company paid taxes of over $10,000,000 for 1915-19 and got a refund of nearly $4,000,000. The case was settled in about a week after amended returns were filed in February, 1921, although in many cases such settlements drag out for months, years. The Committee claims that the company should not only have had no refund, but should have paid $600,000 additional. In the warfare between Senator Couzens and Secretary Mellon, the case has only an indirect bearing, however, since it was settled at Secretary Mellon's request before he took office.

Another case the committee called to attention is that of "Black and Simon." Black owned one-third of a certain oil property, and Simon one-quarter of the same property. The taxes were computed at separate times and apparently by different Treasury experts, whose judgments differed. The result was that Simon's tax was larger than Black's. The Treasury has not, however, closed the case.