The illicit fuel trade in Benin has soared since 1980, and the situation isn’t much better today, reports David Zounmenou for ISS Today.

It’s not often that we hear members of the tobacco industry complaining that a tax authority is not issuing tax stamps – in fact, the complaints are usually because the opposite is true.

CCL Design has announced a partnership with iTRACE Technologies, a leading provider of supply chain security applications for anti-grey and anti-counterfeit markets. The partnership will integrate the iTRACE 2DMI® smartphone authentication capability with CCL Design’s HP Indigo-based security label production.

Europol’s Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment 2021 (SOCTA-21) provides a detailed account of the dramatic impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on organized crime, illicit markets in general and the illicit tobacco market in the EU in particular.

In the January issue of Tax Stamp & Traceability News™, we launched a new series on the use of tax stamps and associated track and trace systems in different regions of the world, starting with Africa. This month, we shift the focus to Asia and Australasia.

The Australian brand protection and consumer engagement solutions provider YPB Group has launched MotifMicro™, its forensic, smartphone-readable, anti-counterfeit technology for high-volume applications, which will provide individualised markers for products and documents.

Following its 4th Annual General Meeting, held in May 2021, the International Tax Stamp Association (ITSA) has appointed four directors to its board.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.