IT experts urged to review Sicpa scheme

MANILA, Philippines - The National Tax Research Center (NTRC) wants government information technology (IT) experts to review the expensive tax stamp system being proposed by SICPA Product Security SA to see if there are flaws in the multi-billion peso scheme.

A source at the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) said NTRC executive director Lina Isorena wrote to BIR Deputy Commissioner Lilia Guillermo to ask the National Computer Center (NCC) and the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) to assess the viability of the costly tax stamp system.

“The NCC and the CICT have the technical expertise and are agencies tasked to monitor communication and information technology activities in the country,” Isorena said in her letter.

The same source said that Isorena’s recommendation was one of the several findings of the NTRC on SICPA’s expensive proposal.

However, Guillermo and the BIR Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) bidding committee shelved the NTRC’s suggestion and declared SICPA as the original proponent even without inputs from the IT professionals.

NTRC said it specifically wants the IT agencies to appraise the “operational feasibility” of SICPA’s system, which includes methods and procedures as well as maintenance of the project.

The NTRC also said the IT experts should thoroughly review the “technical soundness” and the engineering design of the expensive tax stamp method.

Local cigarette manufacturers have vehemently rejected SICPA’s system because of its pricey yet ineffective technology.

They reasoned that paper stamps or stickers can be forged, thus, defeating the purpose of tracking counterfeit and smuggled products. In fact, they said that thousands of fake stamps had already been confiscated in the United States just a month after California implemented SICPA’s scheme.