Raids lead to increase in Excise revenue

The excise revenue had increased by one billion rupees following raids on counterfeit revenue stickers affixed to bottles of liquor within a month after Chairman of the Parliament Committee on Ways and Means Champika Ranawaka threatened to replace the existing sticker with a new digital one, Parliament sources said yesterday.

The sudden increase in the number of raids and the revenue collected in the form of fines was observed during yesterday’s session of the Committee on Public Finance, according to Parliament sources.

During the one-month period following Ranawaka’s proposal to issue a fresh tender for the introduction of a digital sticker to replace the currently used one by the Madras Security Printers Company of India, over 100,000 bottles of liquor, with counterfeit revenue stickers, were identified in the raids, sources said.

Ranawaka’s proposal stipulated that the new digital sticker should feature a QR code for easy customer scanning and should include information such as the specific bottle’s amount of direct tax and a summary of the bottle’s content composition, Parliament sources said.