The excise regime keeps a short list of failures and a long list of costs. Producing dutiable goods without payment, moving them with false or absent stamps, and under-declaring production or value each carry penalties that run from multiples of the duty involved to confiscation of the goods themselves. The sanctions rise with repetition and with proof of intent. The recovery engine is the reconciliation. A plant whose returned production falls materially below its purchased inputs, or whose stamp record vanishes, generates the same examination whether the cause is fraud or sloppy books, because the department meets the difference with the full penalty scale. Intent softens only the classification of the finding, not its arithmetic. The protection is the running reconciliation itself. Plants that match produced units to stamps and stamps to duty weekly enter any examination already balanced, and a balanced file resolves at the level of confirmation rather than penalty. Excise violations are rarely discovered by dramatic raids; they surface on the difference between two registers, which is precisely why the cheap countermeasure, kept honestly, is the reconciliation.