Tax stamps do more than assist governments with tax collection, they also help fight serious crime. Tax stamps can be thought of as the "gateway" to hard-core crime fighting. People who commit tax fraud by counterfeiting tax stamps or failing to buy them are often involved in more serious crime. 

Just two days ago two stories hit the media about four different men charged with tax stamp related violations. All of the men were involved in other crime including drug dealing, handgun possession and sexual assault of a minor.

You can read the stories here:

Mid-Iowa Narcotics Enforcement breaks up ‘drug house’

Search Warrant Results In Drug/Gun/Sex Charges

These are just two stories of the many we have seen over the last several months about serious criminals being arrested for tax stamp violations. But more can be done to use tax stamps as a crime fighting tool.

If every high-value item or even if every pack of cigarettes and every bottle of liquor required a tax stamp that used machine-readable technology (taggant technology being one example), there would be an easy and streamlined way to search for counterfeit tax stamps. It would be possible to search and discover more tax stamp fraud. Discovery of counterfeit tax stamps would then be the trigger to look into other criminal activities. 

InkSure has seen evidence of this first-hand with law enforcement in the Ukraine. Many counterfeit tax stamps, counterfeit products and smuggled have been discovered by law enforcement officials because the tax stamps did not contain InkSure's covert taggants. This discovery would have been much harder to make if the appropriate covert taggants had not been incorporated into the tax stamp. 

We have seen how tax stamps can be used to fight crime. The question is; why aren't governments using them more universally? 

Want to learn more about machine-readable taggants for tax stamps? Make an appointment with an InkSure representative.