What follows is an opinion from the Supreme Court of the United States. Your task is to identify the federal agency involved in the administrative action that occurred prior to the onset of litigation. If the administrative action occurred in a state agency, respond "State Agency". Do not code the name of the state. The administrative activity may involve an administrative official as well as that of an agency. If two federal agencies are mentioned, consider the one whose action more directly bears on the dispute;otherwise the agency that acted more recently. If a state and federal agency are mentioned, consider the federal agency. Pay particular attention to the material which appears in the summary of the case preceding the Court's opinion and, if necessary, those portions of the prevailing opinion headed by a I or II. Action by an agency official is considered to be administrative action except when such an official acts to enforce criminal law. If an agency or agency official "denies" a "request" that action be taken, such denials are considered agency action. Exclude: a "challenge" to an unapplied agency rule, regulation, etc.; a request for an injunction or a declaratory judgment against agency action which, though anticipated, has not yet occurred; a mere request for an agency to take action when there is no evidence that the agency did so; agency or official action to enforce criminal law; the hiring and firing of political appointees or the procedures whereby public officials are appointed to office; attorney general preclearance actions pertaining to voting; filing fees or nominating petitions required for access to the ballot; actions of courts martial; land condemnation suits and quiet title actions instituted in a court; and federally funded private nonprofit organizations.

Opinion:
LILLY et al. v. COMMISSIONER OF INTERNAL REVENUE.
No. 158.
Argued December 3, 1951.
Decided March 10, 1952.
Randolph E. Paul argued the cause for petitioners. With him on the brief was Louis Eisenstein.
Solicitor General Perlman argued the cause for respondent. With him on the brief were Acting Assistant Attorney General Slack, James L. Morrisson and I. Henry Kutz.
Mr. Justice Burton
delivered the opinion of the Court.
Petitioners, Thomas B. Lilly and Helen W. Lilly, his wife, were engaged in the optical business in North Carolina and Virginia in 1943 and 1944. Pursuant to agreements reflecting an established and widespread practice in that industry in those localities, they paid to the respective doctors, who prescribed the eyeglasses which they sold, one-third of the retail sales price received for the glasses. The question here is whether such payments were deductible by petitioners as ordinary and necessary business expenses under §23 (a)(1)(A) of the Internal Revenue Code. For the reasons hereafter stated we hold that they were.
Petitioners owned and operated as partners the City Optical Company with offices in Wilmington, Fayetteville and Greensboro, North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia. Petitioner Helen W. Lilly also owned and operated the Duke Optical Company in Fayetteville.
Since long before 1922 when Thomas B. Lilly established his business in Wilmington, eye doctors, in that locality and to a substantial extent throughout comparable communities in North Carolina, Virginia and elsewhere in the United States, not only examined their patients’ eyes and prescribed glasses, but also sold them the glasses. The doctors bought the frames and lenses at wholesale, prepared and fitted the glasses to the patients and sold the glasses at a profit.
Lilly and other opticians offered to fill the prescriptions for the doctors and to supply and fit the frames to the patients. To compensate the doctors for their loss of profit on the sales, the opticians generally paid the doctors one-third of the retail price of the glasses. While information as to this arrangement was not volunteered to the patients, it was freely disclosed on inquiry. The doctors made it a practice to ask their patients to bring in their new glasses for verification of the prescriptions and to enable the doctors to see that the frames were properly fitted. Without further charge, they made whatever reexaminations and modifications were needed.
For income tax purposes, petitioners treated their payments to the doctors as ordinary and necessary expenses of carrying on business and deducted them from their gross incomes. The doctors, in turn, included them in their taxable gross incomes. However, in 1943 and 1944, the respondent Commissioner of Internal Revenue disallowed these deductions in petitioners’ returns and thereby increased petitioners’ taxable income as follows:
City Optical Duke Optical Company Company
1942. $57,063.45
1943. 61,601.95 $6,568.87
1944. 60,021.65 4,798.35
The Tax Court sustained the Commissioner on the ground that the payments to the doctors were contrary to public policy. One judge dissented. 14 T. C. 1066. The resulting tax deficiences totaled $124,107.78. The Court of Appeals affirmed. 188 F. 2d 269. We granted certiorari, 342 U. S. 808, to resolve the disputed question of statutory construction and to pass upon the application to these facts of the principles announced in Textile Mills Corp. v. Commissioner, 314 U. S. 326, and Commissioner v. Heininger, 320 U. S. 467.
The facts are not in dispute. The payments to the doctors were made by petitioners monthly in the regular course of their business. Under the long-established practice in the optical industry in the localities where petitioners did business, these payments, in 1943 and 1944, were normal, usual and customary in size and character. The transactions from which they arose were of common or frequent occurrence in the type of business involved. They reflected a nationwide practice. Consequently, they were “ordinary” in the generally accepted meaning of that word. See Deputy v. du Pont, 308 U. S. 488, 495; Welch v. Helvering, 290 U. S. 111, 114.
The payments likewise were “necessary” in the generally accepted meaning of that word. It was through making such payments that petitioners had been able to establish their business. Discontinuance of the payments would have meant, in 1943 or 1944, either the resumption of the sale of glasses by the doctors or the doctors’ reference of their patients to competing opticians who shared profits with them. Several doctors testified that they had recommended petitioners and petitioners’ competitor, the American Optical Company, simultaneously. Both were sharing profits with the doctors on substantially the same basis. If either had stopped making the payments while the other continued them, there is no reason to doubt that the doctors thereafter would have omitted their recommendation of the nonpaying optician. In 1943 and 1944 the continuance of these payments was as essential to petitioners as were their other business expenses. As has been said of legal expenses under somewhat comparable circumstances, “To say that this course of conduct and the expenses which it involved were extraordinary or unnecessary would be to ignore the ways of conduct and the forms of speech prevailing in the business world.” Commissioner v. Heininger, 320 U. S. 467, 472.
There is no statement in the Act, or in its accompanying regulations, prohibiting the deduction of ordinary and necessary business expenses on the ground that they violate or frustrate “public policy.”
The Tax Court in the instant case made no finding of fact that the payments to the doctors were not ordinary and necessary business expenses. It sustained the Commissioner’s disallowance of their deductibility because it held that, as a matter of law, the contracts under which the payments were made violated public policy.
We do not have before us the issue that would be presented by expenditures which themselves violated a federal or state law or were incidental to such violations. In such a case it could be argued that the outlawed expenditures, by virtue of their illegality, were not “ordinary and necessary” business expenses within the meaning of §23 (a)(1)(A).
In Textile Mills Corp. v. Commissioner, 314 U. S. 326, this Court accepted an interpretation of that section by a Treasury Regulation which disallowed the deduction of certain expenditures for lobbying purposes. In doing so, the Court referred to the fact that some types of lobbying expenditures had long been condemned by it, and that the interpretative regulation had itself been in effect many years with congressional acquiescence. The instant case does not come within that precedent.
In Commissioner v. Heininger, 320 U. S. 467, this Court was asked to go further and to disallow certain attorneys’ fees and other legal expenses. They were reasonable in amount and had been lawfully incurred by a licensed dentist (1) in resisting the issuance by the Postmaster General of a fraud order which would have destroyed the dentist’s business and (2) in connection with subsequent proceedings on judicial review of the same controversy. While the services resulted in an injunction which stayed the order during the time that the taxable income in question was received, the final result of the litigation was unsuccessful for the taxpayer. Nevertheless, the expenditures were permitted to be deducted as ordinary and necessary expenses of the taxpayer’s business. The opinion in that case reviews the position of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the Board of Tax Appeals and the federal courts. Id., at 473-474. It refers to the narrowing of “the generally accepted meaning of the language used in § 23 (a) in order that tax deduction consequences might not jrustrate sharply defined national or state policies proscribing particular types of conduct.” (Emphasis supplied.) Id., at 473. It concludes that the “language of § 23 (a) contains no express reference to the lawful or unlawful character of the business expenses which are declared to be deductible. ... If the respondent’s litigation expenses are to be denied deduction, it must be because allowance of the deduction would frustrate the sharply defined policies of 39 U. S. C. §§ 259 and 732 which authorize the Postmaster General to issue fraud orders.” Id., at 474. Neither that decision nor the rule suggested by it requires disallowance of petitioners’ expenditures as deductions in the instant case.
Assuming for the sake of argument that, under some circumstances, business expenditures which are ordinary and necessary in the generally accepted meanings of those words may not be deductible as “ordinary and necessary” expenses under §23 (a)(1)(A) when they “frustrate sharply defined national or state policies proscribing particular types of conduct/’ supra, nevertheless the expenditures now before us do not fall in that class. The policies frustrated must be national or state policies evidenced by some governmental declaration of them. In 1943 and 1944 there were no such declared public policies proscribing the payments which were made by petitioners to the doctors.
Customs and the actions of organized professional organizations have an appropriate place in determining in a factual sense what are ordinary and necessary expenses at a given time and place. For example, they materially affect competitive standards which determine whether certain expenditures are in fact ordinary and necessary. Evidence of them is admissible on that issue. They do not, however, in themselves constitute the “sharply defined national or state policies” the frustration of which may, as a matter of law, preclude the deductibility of an expense under § 23 (a)(1)(A).
We voice no approval of the business ethics or public policy involved in the payments now before us. We recognize the province of legislatures to translate progressive standards of professional conduct into law and we note that legislation has been passed in recent years in North Carolina and other states outlawing the practice here considered. We recognize also the organized activities of the medical profession in dealing with the subject. A resulting abolition of the practice will reflect itself in the tax returns of the parties without the retroactive hardship complained of here.
The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed and the cause is remanded with directions to remand to the Tax Court with instructions to set aside its judgment insofar as it is inconsistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
Me. Justice Douglas took no part in the consideration or decision of this case.
“SEC. 23. DEDUCTIONS FROM GROSS INCOME.
“In computing net income there shall be allowed as deductions:
“(a) EXPENSES.—
“(1) Trade or business expenses.—
“(A) In General. — All the ordinary and necessary expenses paid or incurred during the taxable year in carrying on any trade or business . . . .” 53 Stat. 12, 56 Stat. 819, 26 U. S. C. § 23 (a) (1) (A).
The year 1942 was involved in the calculation of the tax for 1943 because of § 6 of the Current Tax Payment Act of 1943, 57 Stat. 145-149.
The American Optical Company, with more than 250 outlets distributed over 47 states, followed this practice, both in competition with petitioners and elsewhere. See also, Snell, Some Principles of Medical Ethics Applied to the Practice of Ophthalmology, 117 A. M. A. J. 497-499 (1941); "What Do You Pay for Eyeglasses?” Fortune Magazine, Oct. 1940, p. 103.
. . . Without this expense, there would have been no business. Without the business, there would have been no income. Without the income, there would have been no tax. To say that this expense is not ordinary and necessary is to say that that which gives life is not ordinary and necessary.” Heininger v. Commissioner, 133 F. 2d 567, 570.
“We conclude that the payments under the contracts between the two optical businesses, composed of petitioners, and the oculists are not deductible as ordinary and necessary expenses because the contracts under which these payments were made violated public policy.” (Emphasis supplied.) 14 T. C. at 1086.
Deductions to cover penalties for unlawful conduct were disallowed in Commissioner v. Longhorn Portland Cement Co., 148 F. 2d 276 (penalties for violation of state antitrust laws); and Great Northern R. Co. v. Commissioner, 40 F. 2d 372 (penalties against railroad for violating federal statutes or regulations). Cf. Rossman Corp. v. Commissioner, 175 F. 2d 711, 713-714 (where an overcharge under the Emergency Price Control Act was allowed to be deducted because it did not frustrate any “sharply defined policies” of the Act). As to deductibility of legal fees incident to the defense of a taxpayer against charges of illegal conduct, see Commissioner v. Heininger, 320 U. S. 467, s. c., 133 F. 2d 567; Kornhauser v. United States, 276 U. S. 145; Commissioner v. Longhorn Portland Cement Co., supra; 4 Mertens, Law of Federal Income Taxation, 384-389; and see generally, Note, 54 Harv. L. Rev. 852-860.
The Government calls attention to its prosecution of certain other opticians in other states, in 1946, for violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act due to price-fixing agreements made with oculists in the course of interstate commerce. The consent decrees in those cases lend little support to the Government’s contention that the payments made by petitioners in 1943 and 1944 in North Carolina and Virginia were not deductible. In fact, the recitals in those decrees tend to confirm the existence of a long-established, widespread, undisturbed practice of the kind described. United States v. Bausch & Lomb Optical Co., Civil Action No. 46C 1332; United States v. American Optical Co., Civil Action No. 46C 1333; United States v. House of Vision-Belgard-Spero, Inc., Civil Action No. 48C 607; and United States v. Uhlemann Optical Co. of Illinois, Civil Action No. 48C 608 (all in U. S. D. C. N. D. Ill.).
Remington’s Wash. Rev. Stat., 1949 Supp., § 10185-14; Deering’s Cal. Business and Professions Code, 1951, §§650, 652; N. C. Laws 1951, c. 1089, §§ 21, 23.
The present trend may lead to the complete abolition of the practice. If so, its abolition will have been accomplished largely by the direct action of those qualified to pass judgment on its justification. This gradually increasing opposition to the practice bears witness to the widespread existence of the practice in such recent times as 1943 and 1944. See Resolution of Section on Ophthalmology of the American Medical Association adopted in June, 1924, but not then presented to the A. M. A. House of Delegates, quoted in 117 A. M. A. J. 498 (1941); Address of Chairman Albert C. Snell, M. D., before the Section on Ophthalmology, 117 A. M. A. J. 497-499 (1941) ; Principles of Medical Ethics of the American Medical Association (1943 and 1949); editorials in 131 A. M. A. J. 1128 (1946); 136 A. M. A. J. 176-177 (1948).
The payments made to the doctors in the instant case, and disallowed as deductions by the courts below, amounted to between 56% and 72% of petitioners’ taxable business income. The income thus taxed had been transferred long ago to the doctors and they had paid their income tax on it.

Question: What is the agency involved in the administrative action?

Choices:
Army and Air Force Exchange Service
Atomic Energy Commission
Secretary or administrative unit or personnel of the U.S. Air Force
Department or Secretary of Agriculture
Alien Property Custodian
Secretary or administrative unit or personnel of the U.S. Army
Board of Immigration Appeals
Bureau of Indian Affairs
Bureau of Prisons
Bonneville Power Administration
Benefits Review Board
Civil Aeronautics Board
Bureau of the Census
Central Intelligence Agency
Commodity Futures Trading Commission
Department or Secretary of Commerce
Comptroller of Currency
Consumer Product Safety Commission
Civil Rights Commission
Civil Service Commission, U.S.
Customs Service or Commissioner or Collector of Customs
Defense Base Closure and REalignment Commission
Drug Enforcement Agency
Department or Secretary of Defense (and Department or Secretary of War)
Department or Secretary of Energy
Department or Secretary of the Interior
Department of Justice or Attorney General
Department or Secretary of State
Department or Secretary of Transportation
Department or Secretary of Education
U.S. Employees' Compensation Commission, or Commissioner
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Environmental Protection Agency or Administrator
Federal Aviation Agency or Administration
Federal Bureau of Investigation or Director
Federal Bureau of Prisons
Farm Credit Administration
Federal Communications Commission (including a predecessor, Federal Radio Commission)
Federal Credit Union Administration
Food and Drug Administration
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
Federal Energy Administration
Federal Election Commission
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
Federal Housing Administration
Federal Home Loan Bank Board
Federal Labor Relations Authority
Federal Maritime Board
Federal Maritime Commission
Farmers Home Administration
Federal Parole Board
Federal Power Commission
Federal Railroad Administration
Federal Reserve Board of Governors
Federal Reserve System
Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation
Federal Trade Commission
Federal Works Administration, or Administrator
General Accounting Office
Comptroller General
General Services Administration
Department or Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare
Department or Secretary of Health and Human Services
Department or Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
Administrative agency established under an interstate compact (except for the MTC)
Interstate Commerce Commission
Indian Claims Commission
Immigration and Naturalization Service, or Director of, or District Director of, or Immigration and Naturalization Enforcement
Internal Revenue Service, Collector, Commissioner, or District Director of
Information Security Oversight Office
Department or Secretary of Labor
Loyalty Review Board
Legal Services Corporation
Merit Systems Protection Board
Multistate Tax Commission
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Secretary or administrative unit or personnel of the U.S. Navy
National Credit Union Administration
National Endowment for the Arts
National Enforcement Commission
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
National Labor Relations Board, or regional office or officer
National Mediation Board
National Railroad Adjustment Board
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
National Security Agency
Office of Economic Opportunity
Office of Management and Budget
Office of Price Administration, or Price Administrator
Office of Personnel Management
Occupational Safety and Health Administration
Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission
Office of Workers' Compensation Programs
Patent Office, or Commissioner of, or Board of Appeals of
Pay Board (established under the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970)
Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation
U.S. Public Health Service
Postal Rate Commission
Provider Reimbursement Review Board
Renegotiation Board
Railroad Adjustment Board
Railroad Retirement Board
Subversive Activities Control Board
Small Business Administration
Securities and Exchange Commission
Social Security Administration or Commissioner
Selective Service System
Department or Secretary of the Treasury
Tennessee Valley Authority
United States Forest Service
United States Parole Commission
Postal Service and Post Office, or Postmaster General, or Postmaster
United States Sentencing Commission
Veterans' Administration or Board of Veterans' Appeals
War Production Board
Wage Stabilization Board
State Agency
Unidentifiable
Office of Thrift Supervision
Department of Homeland Security
Board of General Appraisers
Board of Tax Appeals
General Land Office or Commissioners
NO Admin Action
Processing Tax Board of Review

Answer: 68