Authentix has announced that Tim Driscoll has been appointed as Chief Technology Officer, and advised the appointment of Chad Crouch as Senior Vice President, Revenue Operations and a member of the executive leadership team.

Tax Stamp & Traceability News™ interviewed Jérôme Pichot, Chairman and CEO of Advanced Track & Trace, to learn more about his approach and aspirations in managing this innovative French company.

In this series on emerging technologies, it has been notable how many of these technologies featured strongly at TSTF 2022. In this respect, however, warehouse automation is an interesting exception in that it hardly featured at that meeting.

A review of this year's headlines.
January
Ecuador under pressure? Pakistan reports 11% higher sugar tax revenues; Hungary’s ANY Security Printing to buy Romania’s Atlas; Economist Impact webinar discusses shift in illicit trade in Europe; new family of optical features from OpSec Security; the newest bootleg liquor is counterfeit bourbon; Jura workshops look to the future of security printing, including advancements in digital security printing.

The international standard ISO 22382:2018, which was published in October 2018 as a guidance for tax stamp issuers on best practice in the design, sourcing, issuance, and monitoring of tax stamps, is due for review in 2023.

Ethiopia is looking to introduce tax stamps and track and trace for the first time, with the Ministry of Finance issuing a request for expression of interest to provide a technology solution for an excise stamp and track and trace system.

While the principal method of applying unique identifiers and other variable information to a tax or authentication label is via digital printing, some labels carry that information in a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag.

Globally, revenue authorities are broadening their range of excisable goods to widen the tax base and generate more tax revenues.

The South African case study on dealing with illicit tobacco continues to be an interesting one to follow.

While direct marking could be considered as an opportunity for traceability solutions, it could also be viewed as a threat to physical tax stamps.

Polyart Group, a supplier of film and paper substrates for the specialty label market, and EDGYN, a security solutions specialist, have announced a partnership for the Asia Pacific region.

The ability to link a physical object such as a stamp, label, or direct mark into the digital space, through mobile devices such as a smartphone, is an area of great current interest. A key question to consider is how this physical/digital link may change so we can ensure our technologies keep pace with these changes.

SICPA has finalised the roll-out of its SICPATRACE® platform in the US state of Michigan, under a new five-year contract with the Department of Treasury.

Sri Lanka’s Commissioner General of Excise, M J Gunasiri, has announced that excise revenues from arrack and other alcoholic beverages have plummeted by 40%.

There are two conferences coming up soon which show just how important optical security features still are for authenticating documents such as banknotes, ID, and tax stamps.

SICPA and nanotechnology company UbiQD have announced an expansion of their partnership to develop security inks based on the latter’s quantum dot technology.

Several large-scale seizures over the course of this year have shown that a concerning development, identified during Europol’s Serious and Criminal Organized Crime Assessment 2021 (SOCTA-21), has unfortunately not abated.

In a press statement marking the fifth anniversary of the introduction of excise tax in the United Arab Emirates, the country’s Federal Tax Authority hailed its implementation as an all-round success.

Despite great efforts at a global level, illicit trade has grown into a pandemic, and India is no exception.

For over 17 years, Pakistan’s revenue authority, the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), has been in the crosshairs of providers of tax stamp and track and trace systems for excise products prone to revenue leakage.