Beer Tax Fraud Inquiry: duty stamps on beer bottles will force rebranding

Keith Miller, group indirect tax manager at SAB Miller, told the All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group’s Beer Tax Fraud Inquiry that for branded bottled beer such as Cobra it would be very difficult to add a duty stamp without having to redesign the bottle.

He also hit out at the type of technologies being proposed in the Government consultation into tackling beer duty fraud, such as track and trace which would require people to phone a number to ensure that a code on a bottle is correct and the duty has been paid for the product. He anticipated problems with enforcement, such as checking each cans or bottle in a case.

Miller said: “With the technologies that have been proposed in the consultation, they will rely on effective enforcement. If you have a duty-paid mark, there’s no point having a duty-paid mark if no one actually checks that it is on the bottle.

“Unfortunately there are so many uncertainties within the context of the consultation that it is almost impossible to actually come with meaningful answers.

“Assuming you can mark each bottle, you would have to mark 5bn of the bottles in the UK supply chain, the next challenge is secondary packaging, so how do you check the product has been marked? You’ve got to potentially physically open the pack to check each bottle.”