TWENTIETH" ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 653 



Brothers, for instance — we all know who it was — and these other 

 five or six companies that have been expelled from the exchange? 



Mr. Stafford : In the Rappell case it was a deliberate prac- 

 tice and had gone on for years, and the Bureau of Markets re- 

 quired them to return one year's profits. The other gentlemen, 

 the Bureau of Markets found was the result of a practice that 

 has been going on for years. In other words, you men require 

 service; you require feed to be in the pens when your cattle come 

 there. We order that feed and we can't always tell what you are 

 going to use, and it has accumulated there in some of our cases 

 to the extent of probably three to five cents a car or seven or eight 

 cents, possibly, and that's the way that these accumulations have 

 come about. There is no profit being divided by any of those 

 concerns ; it has been carried along there as a dead account year 

 after year, and year after year. In the same way some of the 

 firms show a loss there of quite a large amount. I could name 

 several firms there that have fifteen or sixteen hundred dollars 

 loss, some five or six hundred, and that loss has been caused in 

 the same way as this profit that they may have ; but there is no 

 firm there, as I understand it, that has ever divided that profit; 

 it simply stands there as a dead account which cannot be divided 

 up ; simply a system that has been there that w^e cannot — it is 

 an account which the Bureau of Markets tells us cannot be kept 

 absolutely to a cent straight. This one concern that we put out 

 of business, we hired auditors and went back in their books just 

 as far as we could find a book to look at, and returned about 

 $18,000 to the shippers. 



Member: Then the offense was really the same, only one man 

 had accumulated so much and the other one had accumulated a 

 great deal, is that the idea? What I am trying to get at is, did 

 they both do the same thing? 



Mr. Stafford: One. firm did this wilfully — they acknowledged 

 that was a way of making profits and meeting their higher ex- 

 penses, and the other, as I say, was not wilfully. 



The Chairman : Unless we as shippers make a complaint the 

 exchange cannot investigate a member's books. Now, that was 

 true with regard to both the gentlemen that were put out of the 

 business because of crooked way of reporting returns, and also 

 these other men. We didn't know that they were stealing from 

 us, and not knowing that of course we could not report it to the 

 exchange. 



