Tax Stamps before Bailouts
2010 saw several countries asking for bailouts from their neighbors. We all saw the news of one country after another claiming that they were bankrupt and that their economies would collapse if they did not receive an emergency injection of funds.
The mass media tended to focus on how these countries where spending their money. As anti-counterfeiting suppliers, we can assess if these countries were doing everything they could to collect the money (taxes) owed to them.
Tax fraud and evasion cost governments billions of dollars per year. One way to reduce tax fraud is through better and more effective tax collection practices. Tax stamps, as one example, provide an easy way for countries to collect tax revenue and verify that it is paid. The government of Ukraine recently upgraded their tax stamps with taggant technology and multi-layered security. The machine readable taggants increased the tax stamp’s overall security and added a layer of covert anti-counterfeiting technology.
The governments that asked for bailouts this year have been making less than a full effort to collect taxes owed to them. Most countries levy taxes on tosbacco and alcohol products. One of the governments that asked for bailout money only issues tax stamps for alcohol. Another only issues tax stamps for tobsacco. One of the countries does not issue tax stamps for either product!
It is hard to believe that taobacco and alcohol taxes would have saved these countries from bankruptcy. However, it would have eased the burden on the rest of the world. Perhaps the EU should require governments asking for bailouts to implement tax stamp programs with a taggant manufacturer or least covert anti-counterfeiting technology. This will ensure at least some revenue being collected.
Tax fraud and evasion cost governments billions of dollars per year. One way to reduce tax fraud is through better and more effective tax collection practices. Tax stamps, as one example, provide an easy way for countries to collect tax revenue and verify that it is paid.
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