Egypt announced on Thursday the pilot launch of the new e-receipt system for consumers at points of sale, a step toward rejuvenating and automating the county's tax and customs systems, which is part of a broader scheme of digital transformation.

Under the new system, Egypt Tax Authority (ETA) will be able to follow up on all business to consumer (B2C) dealings via an electronic central programme, a statement by the Egyptian Ministry of Finance said.

The statement did not provide further details on how many sale points have so far registered in the e-receipt system.

However, Finance Minister Mohamed Maait said the new e-system will be ready for full-scale adoption within six-and-a-half months.

The timeline of modernising and automating the tax and customs systems will be condensed in order to be ready by March 2022 to further strengthen the governance of the country's financial system, the minister added.

The step aims to localise modern technologies to help the business community, stimulate investment, reduce the size of the informal economy, ease procedures for taxpayers, curb tax evasion to maximize the public revenues to enhance the country's spending on improving people’s living standards and improve the level of services, Maait added.

The new step, Maait noted, integrates with the recently launched e-invoice system, to which 2,500 companies have registered so far.

Egypt launched the first stage of the e-invoice system on 15 November 2020, while the second was launched on 15 February 2021.

After the implementation of the e-invoice system, more than 2,800 tax evasion cases have been detected, with tax gaps of over EGP 5.3 billion collected, according to Maait.