The Minister of Finance, Sheku Ahmed Fantamadi Bangura, has decided to take the bull by the horns to ensure the government, through the National Revenue Authority, increases domestic revenue generation in the second half of 2025. He led a high-powered delegation, including his deputies, board members, the chair of the NRA, and senior management staff from the NRA and the Ministry of Finance, on Monday, 11th August 2025, to conduct unannounced on-the-spot checks on the implementation of digital excise stamps on imported and locally produced goods.
In 2024, the government introduced the mandatory Digital Excise Tax Stamps in compliance with the provisions of Section 37 of the Finance Act 2019, which provides for an excise stamp to be mandatorily affixed on all excisable goods specified by the Minister responsible for finance (tobacco, wine, spiritous beverages, and beer products) locally produced or imported.
The process of affixing stamps, in either paper form or digital codes, directly on these excisable products or packages was to enhance consumer protection by reducing counterfeit, harmful and substandard goods, improve the effectiveness of excise taxation by ensuring that there is a level playing field for all manufacturers, importers, distributors, and retailers of excisable goods and improve excise tax revenue collections by reducing smuggling, fraud and illicit trade of excisable goods.
But after a year of implementation, the government is still not realizing the full potential of this reform, as was highlighted by the Minister of Finance in the recent FY 2025 Supplementary budget, stating that domestic revenue collected for the first half of 2025 was lower than projected with a shortfall of close to NLe1.0 billion for the year as a whole.
Minister of Finance, Sheku Ahmed Fantamadi Bangura, outlined several measures to improve domestic revenue mobilisation, including reconciling data from N-SOFT and SICPA technologies with taxpayer submissions for better assessment of GST and excise revenues.
It is against this backdrop that the Minister and his team made several unannounced visits to local beverages and water production plants to assess the functionality of the Digital Excise Stamping system operated by SICPA, data management, monitoring, reporting, and enforcement of the excise tax law.
They visited GVR Bottlers, Kings Beverages, Sierra Fruits, Victory Enterprises, and Shankadas Group. The group was able to establish the installation of the automated SICPA system in some of the production plants; others have the manual sticker to be fixed on the excisable product.
During these visits, the Minister and his team were surprised to note that the full implementation of the stamping process was challenging for several reasons, including deliberate attempts by manufacturers of locally produced beverages to evade tax payment.
While the Minister and his team are planning the next phase of their monitoring exercise, the team has recommended that the management of the National Revenue Authority close the premises of both the Shankadas Group at Ferry Junction and Victory Enterprises at Wellington.
