Tracking Legislation Advances in Philippines

The Philippines’ House Ways and Means Committee has approved legislation that will expand the country’s tobacco tax stamp system into a more comprehensive approach for tracking the entire supply chain of tobacco products, including their origin, route, and final point of sale.

The aim of the legislation is to curb smuggling and other forms of illicit trade on a broader scale, in a country where, according to the head of the Ways and Means Committee, around $4 billion in tobacco duty revenue has been lost over the past four years.

The new tracking system will likely require detailed supply chain information to be embedded within a unique code attached to each product and linked to a centralised database.

While QR codes are already used on the country’s tax stamps, these codes may not contain the level of detail required – although they could certainly link to this information on the database. It remains to be seen, however, whether an additional, directly applied code will be selected to fulfil the requirements of the tracking system, or whether the QR code on the tax stamp will be adapted for this purpose.