New Speakers Confirmed for Tax Stamp & Traceability Forum

The programme for the Tax Stamp & Traceability Forum™ is now complete, and promises to deliver a compelling and informative mix of technical papers, case studies, panel discussions and roundtable workshops. Here we share the latest news with regard to confirmed speakers and topics.

Our ‘coffee table’ panel discussion on 17 May focuses on an industry that is fast becoming one of the top excise revenue earners for those jurisdictions that have legalised it: the cannabis industry. However, as described in Sven Bergmann's article this month, increased tax revenues bring with them several risks for policymakers, including the risk of potential new revenue being instead swallowed up by illicit markets.

Among other topics, the cannabis panel will discuss what can be learned from strategies and technologies used to maximise tax revenue in more traditional excise sectors. It also addresses the unique requirement of cannabis legalisation for a detailed product accounting system that extends from seed-to-sale, and discusses how track and trace and product authentication technologies can satisfy this requirement.

The panel will be chaired by Francisco Mandiola of FMA Secure, Chile, who will be joined by solution providers involved in cannabis supply chain security and authentication.

Other new additions to the programme include OpSec Security, presenting ‘From Grapes to Oil – Balancing Synergy and Customisation in the Expansion of Malta’s Digital Tax Stamp Programme’.

Apart from providing a beautiful setting for the conference, Malta has a comprehensive tax stamp and traceability programme in place for tobacco products and alcohol, provided by OpSec. This is now being extended to products that include lubricating oil to address fake products that are difficult to distinguish from legitimate products, due to the high quality of their packaging.

Asir Ratan Singh of Madras Security Printers will discuss the successful implementation of Liberia’s tax stamp and track and trace system, which extends from point of origin to point of sale. According to Madras, it is one of the few comprehensive track and trace systems operating in English-speaking West Africa.

Juan Carlos Yañez Arenas, Chairman of the International Tax Stamp Association, will examine lessons learned and best practices with regard to tobacco track and trace systems. He will describe successful approaches by tax authorities around the world to fight illicit tobacco trade through the use of tax stamps and track and trace, while presenting a critical view of the track and trace and security feature provisions of the EU Tobacco Products Directive.

HP Indigo Secure will deliver a paper on ‘The Digital Age – Beyond Resolutions and Inks’. In 2021, HP Indigo launched the 6K Secure Digital Press. The first installation of the press for a government authority took place recently in Nepal, for the local production of tax stamps and other secure documents.

Axel Hein of ApiraSol in Germany, describes the company’s market surveillance and product intelligence services for helping enforcement officials and brand owners to quickly identify illicit trade activities and act upon them before it’s too late. The company describes itself as the ‘missing link between online monitoring and physical investigations’, offering services that include the capturing of product samples across the globe via a single interface.

Gary Spinks of Security Fibres will talk about the advantages of using discreet security fibres and StarLites in tax stamps for cost effective and high security solutions. He will present two new products: ‘Myriad fibres’ and ‘Verifibre’, where the latter is a fibre that is detectable through a smartphone app.

Francisco Mandiola of FMA Secure will provide a country-by-country review of tax stamp and traceability systems in Latin America and the Caribbean, while Fernando Barraza of the Chilean tax authority will describe the country’s successful implementation of fiscal traceability on tobacco products.

Linstrom Kinoti of Kenya Revenue Authority will present an initiative for an integrated product marking system that combines tax stamps and other marking regimes required under Kenyan law, and David Chitaishvili of Georgia Revenue Service will describe the digital transformation of tax administration in this country.

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