Governments want dependable methods to know what’s produced, what enters the nation, what’s offered and what tax is owed.
In sectors the place excise duties apply, efficient monitoring may also help cut back income leakage, determine counterfeit merchandise and shield legit companies from opponents working outdoors the legislation.
The problem is to construct a system that achieves these objectives with out creating pointless duplication, slowing manufacturing or shifting extreme prices onto compliant corporations.
Nigeria’s new excise stamp regime presents a possibility to look at how expertise ought 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’ acknowledged aims embody traceability, accountability, product authenticity, digital monitoring and curbing illicit commerce.
Those aims are sound. But the alternative of expertise and the manner it’s built-in into current techniques are essential. A system could be technologically subtle but operationally inefficient.
It can accumulate extra knowledge with out essentially enhancing enforcement. It may also create extra 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 explicit hybrid mannequin is the only and economical technique of reaching its aims.
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 essential digital information of excise operations, manufacturing and gross sales. The affiliation’s objection is that one other compliance layer might duplicate capabilities that authorities has already invested in creating.
The existence of those platforms doesn’t, by itself, show that they will carry out each perform of a product-level authentication system. E-invoicing, for instance, serves a unique speedy goal from verifying a person product in a store or alongside a distribution route.
Likewise, an excise register could present helpful manufacturing knowledge with out essentially giving customers or enforcement officers a straightforward technique of checking the authenticity of a particular merchandise.
That distinction is essential. It can be untimely to conclude that the stamp regime is technically redundant with out evaluating the precise capabilities of the techniques. But it’s equally untimely for the authorities to imagine {that a} new bodily and digital layer is critical with out demonstrating which current capabilities are insufficient.
The authorities ought to start with a techniques audit. What knowledge does B’Odogwu already seize? What data is accessible by way of e-invoicing? Can manufacturing volumes, excise obligations and product actions be reconciled throughout the platforms? Where are the gaps in real-time monitoring? How incessantly do these gaps lead to misplaced income or the circulation of illicit items? And what wouldn’t it price to shut them by way of integration fairly than one other standalone association?
These will not be merely technical questions. They decide whether or not the authorities is spending public assets 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 deal with high-risk transactions. Where a number of companies accumulate comparable knowledge however can’t trade it successfully, the drawback could also be institutional interoperability fairly than the absence of one other platform.
Creating a further system with out fixing that drawback might 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 could present a visual authentication characteristic, but it surely will also be falsified, eliminated, copied or improperly reused if safety and verification procedures are insufficient.
Digital identifiers will not be proof against manipulation both: poorly secured databases, cloned codes, compromised gadgets and weak entry controls can undermine a digital-only resolution. No expertise is routinely efficient just because it’s bodily or digital.
The appropriate response is to not assume that every one bodily stamps are out of date, nor that each digital different is superior. It is to check out there fashions towards measurable standards: authentication accuracy, resistance to fraud, ease of verification, implementation price, production-line velocity, knowledge safety, interoperability and the capability to detect illicit provide chains.
A hybrid system could also be justified in circumstances the place a bodily safety characteristic gives a demonstrable benefit. But the place a digital identifier linked to a safe, interoperable database can ship the identical outcome at decrease price, requiring a bodily stamp could 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 techniques, together with the threat 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 power 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 current techniques.
A pilot programme with impartial analysis might assist set up whether or not the system improves compliance and authentication in observe. The outcomes ought to be made public, and the authorities ought to be ready to change the design if the proof reveals that the system is simply too expensive or fails to ship the anticipated advantages.
The problem of knowledge possession and entry must even be addressed. Manufacturers ought to know what data they’re required to submit, how will probably 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 legit companies to deal with producing and distributing items.
A contemporary tax administration is just not one which deploys the biggest variety of platforms, however one which makes its techniques work collectively. The authorities mustn’t deal with one other stamp as proof of progress. It ought to reveal that the new regime performs a essential perform that current infrastructure can’t adequately ship.
If that proof is absent, the hybrid system ought to be redesigned round integration, digital verification and focused enforcement. Nigeria doesn’t want expertise for its personal sake. It wants expertise that closes actual gaps, protects customers, 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 type and cease imposing extra compliance burdens on legit producers with out first proving that the system delivers advantages current 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 larger for customers.
The Nigeria Customs Service must reveal, with verifiable proof, why the current B’Odogwu Automated Excise Register System and FIRS e-invoicing can’t be strengthened and built-in to realize the identical aims extra effectively.
Until that case is convincingly established, the policy ought to be suspended and subjected to an impartial technical, authorized and financial assessment. Nigeria wants smarter tax enforcement, not one other layer of paperwork; stronger digital integration, not expensive duplication; and a manufacturing-friendly tax system, not a regime that penalises companies for working inside the legislation.
The authorities must pursue illicit merchants and tax evaders with dedication, but it surely must not make compliant producers and unusual Nigerians pay the worth for an inadequately justified policy.
Kunle Adebisi, a public affairs analyst, writes from Lagos.
