Sierra Leone requires a damaged or faulty ECR machine to be replaced at a gazetted cost

What changed in detail

The Finance Act, 2026 (Act No. 1 of 2026), published as a supplement to the Sierra Leone Gazette Extraordinary Vol. CLXVII, No. 3 of 7 January 2026, amends the Goods and Services Tax Act, 2009. Section 21 of the Finance Act inserts a new subsection (8) into section 34 of the GST Act, immediately after subsection (7).

The new subsection provides that where an electronic cash register (ECR) machine used by a taxpayer is to be replaced because it is damaged, faulty or defective, the taxpayer must replace it at a cost determined by the Commissioner-General and published in the Gazette.

Section 1 of the Finance Act provides that, unless otherwise provided, the Act is deemed to have come into operation on 1 January 2026. The Act was passed in Parliament on 25 November 2025 and signed by the President on 29 December 2025.

The Act does not itself state the replacement cost. It makes the Commissioner-General’s gazetted determination the operative figure, and sets no deadline for that determination to be published.

What it means

The duty reads as routine and is not: it moves the cost of an ECR failure onto the taxpayer at a price the taxpayer does not set. Until the Commissioner-General gazettes a figure, the amount is unknown, so budgeting for a replacement is guesswork and the Gazette is the only place the answer will appear.

Practically, this makes ECR estate management a compliance matter rather than an IT one. How many machines are deployed, how old they are, and which are already faulty is what determines the exposure — and a device left unreplaced is now a breach of section 34, not just a broken till.