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Governments need reliable ways to know what is produced, what enters the country, what is sold and what tax is owed.
In sectors where excise duties apply, effective monitoring can help reduce revenue leakage, identify counterfeit products and protect legitimate businesses from competitors operating outside the law.
The challenge is to build a system that achieves these goals without creating unnecessary duplication, slowing production or shifting excessive costs onto compliant companies.
Nigeria’s new excise stamp regime presents an opportunity to examine how technology should be deployed in public administration.
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The Nigeria Customs Service Excise Stamp Regulations, 2026, establish a framework for physical or electronic authentication marks and the monitoring of excisable products. The regulations’ stated objectives include traceability, accountability, product authenticity, digital monitoring and curbing illicit trade.
Those objectives are sound. But the choice of technology and the way it is integrated into existing systems are crucial. A system can be technologically sophisticated yet operationally inefficient.
It can collect more data without necessarily improving enforcement. It can also create additional costs for businesses while leaving the underlying problem—weak coordination, poor intelligence or ineffective inspections—unresolved.
This is why the debate should not be reduced to whether tax stamps are useful in principle. The real question is whether Nigeria’s particular hybrid model is the most effective and economical means of achieving its objectives.
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 provide important digital records of excise operations, production and sales. The association’s objection is that another compliance layer could duplicate functions that government has already invested in developing.
The existence of these platforms does not, by itself, prove that they can perform every function of a product-level authentication system. E-invoicing, for example, serves a different immediate purpose from verifying an individual product in a shop or along a distribution route.
Likewise, an excise register may provide useful production data without necessarily giving consumers or enforcement officers an easy means of checking the authenticity of a specific item.
That distinction is important. It would be premature to conclude that the stamp regime is technically redundant without comparing the actual capabilities of the systems. But it is equally premature for the government to assume that a new physical and digital layer is necessary without demonstrating which existing functions are inadequate.
The authorities should begin with a systems audit. What data does B’Odogwu already capture? What information is available through e-invoicing? Can production volumes, excise obligations and product movements be reconciled across the platforms? Where are the gaps in real-time monitoring? How frequently do those gaps result in lost revenue or the circulation of illicit goods? And what would it cost to close them through integration rather than another standalone arrangement?
These are not merely technical questions. They determine whether the government is spending public resources and imposing private-sector costs efficiently.
A well-designed digital system should reduce duplication, automate routine reporting, improve the quality of information and help enforcement agencies focus on high-risk transactions. Where several agencies collect similar data but cannot exchange it effectively, the problem may be institutional interoperability rather than the absence of another platform.
Creating an additional system without solving that problem could leave businesses entering similar information repeatedly while agencies continue to operate separate databases. That would be a failure of digital governance, not a triumph of modernisation.
The physical component raises further questions. A physical mark may provide a visible authentication feature, but it can also be falsified, removed, copied or improperly reused if security and verification procedures are inadequate.
Digital identifiers are not immune to manipulation either: poorly secured databases, cloned codes, compromised devices and weak access controls can undermine a digital-only solution. No technology is automatically effective simply because it is physical or digital.
The correct response is not to assume that all physical stamps are obsolete, nor that every digital alternative is superior. It is to compare available models against measurable criteria: authentication accuracy, resistance to fraud, ease of verification, implementation cost, production-line speed, data security, interoperability and the ability to detect illicit supply chains.
A hybrid system may be justified in circumstances where a physical security feature provides a demonstrable advantage. But where a digital identifier linked to a secure, interoperable database can deliver the same result at lower cost, requiring a physical stamp may amount to unnecessary friction.
The government should also be cautious about adopting claims from international experience without examining the context.
MAN has cited concerns about the costs and operational consequences of stamp systems, including the risk that paper-based marks can be falsified.
Such claims warrant independent evaluation. Their relevance to Nigeria depends on the design of the proposed system, the characteristics of the affected industries and the strength of enforcement institutions.
Before imposing a mandatory system across the relevant product categories, the authorities should publish a technical and economic assessment that compares the proposed model with feasible alternatives. It should include a clear baseline against which performance can be measured, including current revenue leakage, detected counterfeit products, compliance costs and the capacity of existing systems.
A pilot programme with independent evaluation could help establish whether the system improves compliance and authentication in practice. The results should be made public, and the government should be prepared to modify the design if the evidence shows that the system is too costly or fails to deliver the expected benefits.
The issue of data ownership and access must also be addressed. Manufacturers should know what information they are required to submit, how it will be protected, which agencies can access it and how errors can be corrected. A credible system needs safeguards against misuse, unnecessary disclosure and operational disruption.
Nigeria’s digital transformation should make compliance easier, not multiply administrative obstacles. Technology should help government collect revenue with greater precision and lower cost, while allowing legitimate businesses to focus on producing and distributing goods.
A modern tax administration is not one that deploys the greatest number of platforms, but one that makes its systems work together. The government should not treat another stamp as proof of progress. It should demonstrate that the new regime performs a necessary function that existing infrastructure cannot adequately deliver.
If that evidence is absent, the hybrid system should be redesigned around integration, digital verification and targeted enforcement. Nigeria does not need technology for its own sake. It needs technology that closes real gaps, protects consumers, strengthens public revenue and reduces the cost of compliance. Anything less risks turning digital modernisation into another expensive administrative layer.
Ultimately, the Federal Government must reject the hybrid excise stamp policy in its present form and stop imposing additional compliance burdens on legitimate manufacturers without first proving that the system delivers benefits existing infrastructure cannot provide.
Nigeria cannot credibly pursue tax reform, industrial expansion, job creation and economic competitiveness while allowing regulatory duplication to increase production costs, complicate factory operations and potentially push prices higher for consumers.
The Nigeria Customs Service must demonstrate, with verifiable evidence, why the existing B’Odogwu Automated Excise Register System and FIRS e-invoicing cannot be strengthened and integrated to achieve the same objectives more efficiently.
Until that case is convincingly established, the policy should be suspended and subjected to an independent technical, legal and economic review. Nigeria needs smarter tax enforcement, not another layer of bureaucracy; stronger digital integration, not costly duplication; and a manufacturing-friendly tax system, not a regime that penalises businesses for operating within the law.
The government must pursue illicit traders and tax evaders with determination, but it must not make compliant manufacturers and ordinary Nigerians pay the price for an inadequately justified policy.
Kunle Adebisi, a public affairs analyst, writes from Lagos.
