Essay On Cigarette Smuggling

Cigarette Smuggling

Introduction:

Government officials have been making the strides to stop the illegal trafficking of cigarettes. Cigarette Smuggling is a multibillion-dollar business that is taking money away from the government and fueling organized crime and corruption all over the world. Tobacco is the world’s most widely smuggled legal substance across any boarder. Many factors contribute to the cause of cigarette smuggling. Those factors being high rates of cigarette consumption, high tax rates on cigarettes, and high tax-induced cross-border price differentials. All over the country, federal, state, and local governments tax tobacco. Tobacco products are taxed in two ways the unit tax and valorem tax. The unit tax for tobacco is the

In, Serbia on June 11, 2007, a family with the last name of Milosevic who was involved in a cigarette smuggling ring. This family had believed to earn tens of millions of euros from 1996 to 2001 (Reuters 2007.) Proceeds from their sales were transferred to offshore firms.

Another incident that relates to the case in Serbia is in January of 1941; a German refugee and 4 others were convicted in Federal court for smuggling cigarette lighter sparkle wheels in an alleged scheme to cost the government $150,000 in unpaid imported tax (NYT 1941.) These groups of men had reportedly smuggled around 70,000 sparkle wheels.

These types of cigarette smuggling plots also occur in the United States as well. On, March 25th, 2010 federal authorities in New York City, took a group of men and women into custody who were moving untaxed cigarettes across state lines into the city to be on the black market. The federal authorities caught wind of this cigarette smuggling group from an investigation that started out of the tobacco and firearms agency’s field division in Philadelphia a few years prior to the time of