In April, Reconnaissance International held a one-hour webinar to present its new review 'Tax Stamps & Traceability: A Market Analysis and Technical Update' to over 200 registrants. The co-editor of the review, Nicola Sudan, was joined by its two main contributors: Michael Eads (ME) of Sovereign Border Solutions, and Richard Jotcham (RJ) of Axess Technologies.

Georgia has a remarkably successful tobacco tax stamp programme which has been reported on in Tax Stamp & Traceability News™ (TSTN). Here we interview two managers from the Revenue Service of the Ministry of Finance of Georgia (GRS), Levan Dgebuadze, head of the Service Department, and Samson Uridia, head of the International Relations Department, to find out more about it.

In March, the consortium of Authentix, Inc, MITAS Corporation and AJCL Private Limited finalised a licence agreement with the Pakistan Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to implement a track and trace system on tobacco, cement, sugar and fertiliser. The agreement covered an initial five-year term, with a three-year extension option.

An ongoing issue of concern to the tax stamp world has recently resurfaced. The issue refers to the recent release of tax stamp tender specifications for Oman, which appear to eliminate all but a seemingly preselected supplier, thereby rendering what should be a competitive tender almost non-competitive.

Nepal has been using excise stamps (hereinafter referred to as tax stamps) for more than two decades now, with the stamps effectively contributing to government tax revenue. Indeed, every year, the Nepalese government generates 57 billion Nepalese rupees ($477 million) from excise duty, value-added tax, and health hazard tax imposed on cigarettes and alcohol.

Track and trace, trace and track, supply chain transparency, traceability… a confusion of terms to describe the use of an encoded unique identifier to determine the source and the pathway of an individual product.

In a March article published by the Tax Foundation, Ulrik Boesen, Senior Policy Analyst, Excise Taxes, at the foundation’s Center for State Tax Policy examined how US state lawmakers are considering increasing excise taxes on soft drinks to offset decreases in income tax.

SICPA has announced a new three-year partnership with Rhizo Verified, a US-based third-party hemp verification, authentication, and traceability solutions company.

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In the July 2016 issue of Tax Stamp News™, Sven Bergmann of Venture Global Consulting covered a report by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute – a conservative policy think tank in Ottawa, Canada – on the illicit tobacco trade in Canada.

During March and early April, De La Rue ran its inaugural Excise Tax Protection Course. The six-module course, delivered as online seminars, was aimed at government excise managers and professionals and was by invitation only. De La Rue plans for the course to become an annual event.

The Philippines Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) has announced it will reverse the rules exempting export cigarettes from carrying tax stamps, after a legislator raised concerns that exports were entering the market as tax-free smuggled goods.

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) has released two articles in connection with its investigations into cigarette smuggling activities in West Africa.

In 2019, more than 25 people died in a single case of alcohol poisoning resulting from methanol-laced alcoholic drinks. Soon thereafter, the government closed over 10 establishments and seized 55,000 containers of the killer alcohol.

In last month’s issue of Authentication News®, we looked at the tantalising prospect of combining the analytical capability and connectivity of a smartphone with the authenticating power of a hologram, touching on how reliance on end-user knowledge of hologram features could be alleviated by the use of smartphones to verify the holograms.

An ongoing issue of concern to the tax stamp world has recently resurfaced. It refers to the use of the term ‘tax stamp’ to describe security features that have nothing to do with tax collection.

On 1 April, the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) will launch its ‘Digital Tax Stamps’ (DTS) programme on cement and sugar. Initially introduced at the end of 2019 on domestic and imported beer, spirits, wine, soda, mineral water and tobacco products, the programme resulted in a 270% increase in the number of active taxpayers in the country.

When Canada legalized cannabis in October 2018, the expectation was that cannabis would be a significant revenue generator right out of the gate.

In its bid to generate excise revenue and disrupt the kind of spurious partnerships between manufacturers and transporters that have led to tragedies involving illicit liquor, the Punjab state government has adopted a slew of excise policy measures.

A recent webinar, entitled ‘How Non-Cloneable Codes Enable Supply Chain Automation and Credible Traceability,’ has raised contentious questions with regard to the use of physical security features and unique identifying codes as authentication tools.