May 23 (Bloomberg) -- Presidential candidates John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are bickering over whether to suspend the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal gasoline tax to ease the impact of rising prices. Some people are increasingly taking matters into their own hands.
For two years, Larry West's company trucked fuel directly from Mississippi River barges to convenience stores between Houston and Corpus Christi, Texas. He didn't pay a penny in tax, claiming he was distributing ``petroleum distillates,'' not gasoline.
A state jury rejected his explanation and in 2005 convicted him of evading Texas fuel taxes; investigators are now focusing on some of his associates, who they suspect have continued to dodge legal requirements.
Fuel-tax evasion steals funds needed for transportation projects at a time when the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates it will cost $1.6 trillion over five years to repair the highways, bridges and the rest of the nation's infrastructure. Lawmakers and regulators say tax-evasion schemes involving illicit blending of fuels also damage engines and poison the environment.
``With the price of fuel going up and people getting more desperate for it, everything we've been finding since the mafia days, we're going to see that again,'' says Cindy Anders-Robb, a motor-fuels tax associate at the Federation of Tax Administrators, which represents state revenue agencies in Washington.
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