Tired of losing inestimable revenues due to the increasing value of smuggled liquor, Rwanda Revenue Authority has introduced tax stamps for all imported alcoholic beverages.All liquor importers have been directed to use the stamps beginning July 1.The Deputy Commissioner General of RRA, Richard Tusabe, said when all liquors are etched with a tax stamp, smugglers will have nowhere to hide.“The tax stamps will be an indication that the dealer passed through the right channels and that all the taxes were paid. It has been difficult to identify smuggled liquors from the authorised and safe ones, but with the tax stamps, this will be no more,” Tusabe explained when he met with close to 20 liquor dealers yesterday to discuss the development.“Starting on July 1, tax officials will visit shops, bars and nightclubs and it will be easy for them to identify liquors that were smuggled, confiscate them and pronounce fines to owners as stipulated by the law”.He added that the tax authority has stocked over 100 million stamps, which will also help identify counterfeit liquors on the market.According to some liquor traders, the increase in smuggling is due to the high tax rate charged on liquor imports that are charged 70 percent excise duty, the highest for any imports.“We have been competing with people who sell their wines at any rate simply because they smuggled it into the country. I entirely welcome the tax stamps because we all now have a fair ground to compete,” Venkat Narayanan, the Branch Manager of Rwanda Spirits and Wines Distributors, said in an interview with The New Times.“It seems as though RRA delayed in implementing such an important element as this but we are glad that it has finally come into force now.”The authority said too much liquor is illegally sneaked in through the borders in vehicles that have secret chambers or through under declarations, where traders pay taxes for only a fraction of the liquor they import.RRA plans to carry out an analysis in the first three months of the stamps’ introduction, to find out how much it had lost in form of revenues due to smuggled liquors.
