Governments want dependable methods to know what’s produced, what enters the nation, what’s bought and what tax is owed.
In sectors the place excise duties apply, efficient monitoring might help cut back income leakage, determine counterfeit merchandise and shield professional companies from opponents working outdoors the regulation.
The problem is to construct a system that achieves these targets with out creating pointless duplication, slowing manufacturing or shifting extreme prices onto compliant firms.
Nigeria’s new excise stamp regime presents a possibility to look at how know-how needs to be deployed in public administration.
The Nigeria Customs Service Excise Stamp Regulations, 2026, set up a framework for bodily or digital authentication marks and the monitoring of excisable merchandise. The rules’ said targets embody traceability, accountability, product authenticity, digital monitoring and curbing illicit commerce.
Those targets are sound. But the alternative of know-how and the means it’s built-in into present methods are essential. A system could be technologically refined but operationally inefficient.
It can accumulate extra information with out essentially enhancing enforcement. It may also create further prices for companies whereas leaving the underlying drawback—weak coordination, poor intelligence or ineffective inspections—unresolved.
This is why the debate shouldn’t be decreased as to if tax stamps are helpful in precept. The actual query is whether or not Nigeria’s specific hybrid mannequin is the best and economical technique of attaining its targets.
MAN has argued that the Customs Service’s B’Odogwu Automated Excise Register System and the Federal Inland Revenue Service’s e-invoicing platform already present vital digital data of excise operations, manufacturing and gross sales. The affiliation’s objection is that one other compliance layer may duplicate features that authorities has already invested in growing.
The existence of those platforms doesn’t, by itself, show that they’ll carry out each operate of a product-level authentication system. E-invoicing, for instance, serves a unique quick goal from verifying a person product in a store or alongside a distribution route.
Likewise, an excise register might present helpful manufacturing information with out essentially giving shoppers or enforcement officers a simple technique of checking the authenticity of a particular merchandise.
That distinction is vital. It can be untimely to conclude that the stamp regime is technically redundant with out evaluating the precise capabilities of the methods. But it’s equally untimely for the authorities to imagine {that a} new bodily and digital layer is critical with out demonstrating which present features are insufficient.
The authorities ought to start with a methods audit. What information does B’Odogwu already seize? What data is accessible via e-invoicing? Can manufacturing volumes, excise obligations and product actions be reconciled throughout the platforms? Where are the gaps in real-time monitoring? How often do these gaps end in misplaced income or the circulation of illicit items? And what wouldn’t it price to shut them via integration slightly than one other standalone association?
These usually are not merely technical questions. They decide whether or not the authorities is spending public sources and imposing private-sector prices effectively.
A well-designed digital system ought to cut back duplication, automate routine reporting, enhance the high quality of knowledge and assist enforcement companies give attention to high-risk transactions. Where a number of companies accumulate comparable information however can’t trade it successfully, the drawback could also be institutional interoperability slightly than the absence of one other platform.
Creating a further system with out fixing that drawback may go away companies coming into comparable data repeatedly whereas companies proceed to function separate databases. That can be a failure of digital governance, not a triumph of modernisation.
The bodily part raises additional questions. A bodily mark might present a visual authentication characteristic, but it surely may also be falsified, eliminated, copied or improperly reused if safety and verification procedures are insufficient.
Digital identifiers usually are not proof against manipulation both: poorly secured databases, cloned codes, compromised gadgets and weak entry controls can undermine a digital-only resolution. No know-how is robotically efficient just because it’s bodily or digital.
The appropriate response is to not assume that each one bodily stamps are out of date, nor that each digital different is superior. It is to check accessible fashions towards measurable standards: authentication accuracy, resistance to fraud, ease of verification, implementation price, production-line velocity, information safety, interoperability and the potential to detect illicit provide chains.
A hybrid system could also be justified in circumstances the place a bodily safety characteristic offers a demonstrable benefit. But the place a digital identifier linked to a safe, interoperable database can ship the similar consequence at decrease price, requiring a bodily stamp might quantity to pointless friction.
The authorities also needs to be cautious about adopting claims from worldwide expertise with out inspecting the context.
MAN has cited considerations about the prices and operational penalties of stamp methods, together with the danger that paper-based marks could be falsified.
Such claims warrant impartial analysis. Their relevance to Nigeria will depend on the design of the proposed system, the traits of the affected industries and the energy of enforcement establishments.
Before imposing a compulsory system throughout the related product classes, the authorities ought to publish a technical and financial evaluation that compares the proposed mannequin with possible alternate options. It ought to embody a transparent baseline towards which efficiency could be measured, together with present income leakage, detected counterfeit merchandise, compliance prices and the capability of present methods.
A pilot programme with impartial analysis may assist set up whether or not the system improves compliance and authentication in observe. The outcomes needs to be made public, and the authorities needs to be ready to switch the design if the proof exhibits that the system is just too pricey or fails to ship the anticipated advantages.
The subject of knowledge possession and entry must even be addressed. Manufacturers ought to know what data they’re required to submit, how it will likely be protected, which companies can entry it and the way errors could be corrected. A reputable system wants safeguards towards misuse, pointless disclosure and operational disruption.
Nigeria’s digital transformation ought to make compliance simpler, not multiply administrative obstacles. Technology ought to assist authorities accumulate income with better precision and decrease price, whereas permitting professional companies to give attention to producing and distributing items.
A contemporary tax administration just isn’t one which deploys the biggest variety of platforms, however one which makes its methods work collectively. The authorities mustn’t deal with one other stamp as proof of progress. It ought to show that the new regime performs a vital operate that present infrastructure can’t adequately ship.
If that proof is absent, the hybrid system needs to be redesigned round integration, digital verification and focused enforcement. Nigeria doesn’t want know-how for its personal sake. It wants know-how that closes actual gaps, protects shoppers, strengthens public income and reduces the price of compliance. Anything much less dangers turning digital modernisation into one other costly administrative layer.
Ultimately, the Federal Government must reject the hybrid excise stamp policy in its current kind and cease imposing further compliance burdens on professional producers with out first proving that the system delivers advantages present infrastructure can’t present.
Nigeria can’t credibly pursue tax reform, industrial growth, job creation and financial competitiveness whereas permitting regulatory duplication to extend manufacturing prices, complicate manufacturing facility operations and probably push costs greater for shoppers.
The Nigeria Customs Service must show, with verifiable proof, why the present B’Odogwu Automated Excise Register System and FIRS e-invoicing can’t be strengthened and built-in to attain the similar targets extra effectively.
Until that case is convincingly established, the policy needs to be suspended and subjected to an impartial technical, authorized and financial evaluate. Nigeria wants smarter tax enforcement, not one other layer of paperwork; stronger digital integration, not pricey duplication; and a manufacturing-friendly tax system, not a regime that penalises companies for working inside the regulation.
The authorities must pursue illicit merchants and tax evaders with willpower, but it surely must not make compliant producers and strange Nigerians pay the worth for an inadequately justified policy.
Kunle Adebisi, a public affairs analyst, writes from Lagos.
