FOREST TAXATION IN THE UNITED STATES 087 
warrant such attempt at logical perfection. The least variation from 
present procedure would result if the yield from all forest property on 
one tax roll were reported by ownerships to the officials preparing the 
tax roll. In this way all property in one ownership in the tax billing 
district, be it township, county, or State, would be considered as a 
unit for the proportionate reduction in the adjusted value increment 
on account of the receipt of a yield. However, the smaller the district 
chosen, the greater is the chance of unwarranted concessions to the 
owner. 
Transfer of ownership of a parcel of timber should not affect the 
adjusted value increment of that parcel. However, the market value 
of the parcel sold or transferred should be considered as gross income, 
to be divided among the different parcels of the ownership of which it 
had been a part in the same manner as other gross income. In this 
way no tax advantage would be secured by transferring to another 
party a parcel of timber which was to be cut in the near future. Upon 
such a transfer the cumulative adjusted value increment on the 
remaining property in the ownership would be reduced by the value 
of the parcel transferred. 
ADMINISTRATIVE DETAILS 
Every taxpayer having forest property should be invited to furnish 
the assessor with a sworn statement of the stumpage value of the 
timber or other forest products harvested or sold and all other income 
from the property, or else a sworn statement that no income was 
received. This statement should cover 1 year ending at the time 
of assessment and should be filed at any time after the assessment 
date within a prescribed period sufficiently limited in length to allow 
time for checking and for computation of the adjusted tax base. 
As a penalty for failure to furnish the assessor with a statement of 
income, the tax rate would be applied to the assessed value rather 
than to the adjusted tax base to determine the current year’s taxes, 
and the cumulative adjusted value increment from prior years would 
not be carried over and used in computing the adjusted tax base for 
subsequent years; provided that if the taxpayer should, within a 
limited time, file an income statement covering the year or years 
during which he failed to file, his accumulated adjusted value incre- 
ment might be restored from that date. In farm wood-lot regions 
where very small forest yields are received in varying amounts but 
quite regularly, the farmer might not consider it worth the effort to 
file an annual income statement. Under such conditions this plan 
would automatically be inoperative. 
The assessor should ordinarily be able to check the filed statements 
during the progress of his regular valuation work. However, so far 
as the adjusted property tax is concerned, precise check of the reports 
of income would ordinarily not be very important. Failure of the 
owner to make any report as to his income would, under the procedure 
outlined in the preceding paragraph, be all to the owner’s disad- 
vantage. He would lose all the advantage of the increment deduction, 
plus whatever influence his report of cut might have had in causing a 
reduced initial assessment of his property. Should the owner report 
less than the actual income, he would gain by making his increment 
deduction larger than it should be, provided the reported income were 
not sufficient to wipe out the deduction entirely; beyond that, under- 
