The BiH Council of Ministers on 12 October adopted the Excise Tax Law and
Sales Tax law. These two laws are absolutely essential in removing a key
obstacle to BiH’s economic recovery, and it is therefore imperative that they
are placed before the BiH Parliamentary Assembly without any further delay.
Ideally the assembly should debate the laws in the next two weeks.

The laws are important because they will resolve glaring anomalies in the
existing sales tax and excise tax systems, ahead of the introduction of VAT.
Among other things, they will provide for the abolition of the system that
requires special invoices to be issued for some goods if they are produced in
one Entity and sold in the other. This is a time-consuming bureaucratic
absurdity that stems from the failed attempt immediately after the war to create
two economies in BiH. Citizens have paid a huge price for this in terms of lost
trade and lost opportunities to create jobs. The sooner this is fixed the
better. OHR urges parliamentarians to debate this law quickly and put an end to
an economic disadvantage that is both pointless and
self-inflicted.