Tanzania legislstor calls for concerted efforts for eletronic tax stamps to work effetively
Dodoma. The Moshi Urban MP (Chadema), Anthony Komu, has called on the Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA) and the Tanzania Bureau of Standards to prepare a strategy to prevent forgery of the electronic tax stamps. This’d improve effectiveness in public revenue collections.
Mr Komu said this on the sidelines of the recent parliamentary session that use of Electronic Tax Stamps (ETS) on products would have minimal impact on revenue collections if efforts were not taken to fight forging of the stamps. The ETS system enables the government to use modern technology to obtain production data timely from producers.
The first phase of the project was rolled out by a Swiss firm, Société Industrielle et Commerciale de Produits Alimentaires, on January 15 this year, and electronic stamps were installed for 19 producers of alcohol, wines and spirits in the country.
The second phase of the project, which saw to electronic stamps being installed on products such as sweetened or flavoured waters and other nonalcoholic beverages began on August 1, 2019.
But Mr Komu said some manufacturers have been forging the stamp and caused huge of lose of revenue to the government. He said most of the manufacturers are based in foreign countries where technological advancement allows them to manoeuvre the technology behind the ETS.
“If the two authorities [TRA and TBS] don’t work together we can be sure that the goal will never be met. There must be efforts to educate people so that they can be able to tell the genuine stamp from the fake one,” said Mr Komu.
Mr Komu claimed that people have been made to consumer counterfeit product – such as beers – and even when it happened that the product was genuine they were not taxed. He claimed this was due to the forgery of the ETS.
The government believes apart from giving the government first-hand information on production in factories, the use of ETS has also had a profound impact in curbing the influx of counterfeits in the market.
The deputy minister for Industry and Trade, Ms Stella Manyanya, told reporters on the sideline of the just-ended parliamentary sessions last week that since the country started rolling out the stamps, the number of fake products in the market was steadily going down.
