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Many of the tax tricks charged were such routine items as failure to report in full income from ticket sales, concessions, dividends, stock deals, or "false, fictitious and fraudulent" deductions for interest, damages or bad debts, including one for $50,000 due from the late Promoter George L. ("Tex") Rickard which was allegedly deducted twice. But the mainstay of the Ringling tax experts, said the Government, was the circus inventory which they managed to persuade the Bureau of Internal Revenue to swallow whole. The bigger the inventory, the more depreciation may be charged against it.
"In one instance," said the Government, "the entire inventory of the Adam Forepaugh and Sells Bros. Circus was found to be 100% fictitious." A favorite circus write-off is "abandoned"' animals. The Ringlings claimed they had abandoned no less than 48 elephants. If all the other animals written off by the Ringlings were really abandoned, an official observed caustically last week, the U. S. would by this time be one of the world's finest big game preserves.