  We study the appearance of anomalies of the Master Ward Identity, which is a
universal renormalization condition in perturbative QFT. The main insight of
the present paper is that any violation of the Master Ward Identity can be
expressed as a LOCAL interacting field; this is a version of the well-known
Quantum Action Principle of Lowenstein and Lam. Proceeding in a proper field
formalism by induction on the order in $\hbar$, this knowledge about the
structure of possible anomalies as well as techniques of algebraic
renormalization are used to remove possible anomalies by finite
renormalizations. As an example the method is applied to prove the Ward
identities of the O(N) scalar field model.
