Japan Tax Free uses Accura Scan for Tax Refunds

01 Mar 2020

Today we are going to talk about the most developed country in South Asia, Japan.

To take advantage of shopping in Japan, you have to think about Japan's Tax Exemption program. Duty exclusion or Tax exemption in Japan fundamentally applies to all things, from general things, for example, home machines, frill, and shoes, to consumable things, for example, liquor, nourishment, beauty care products, tobacco, and drugs. Expense is excluded uniquely under specific conditions.

When you buy certain articles in Japan, prices include consumption tax (8%). However, as a special measure, tourists from overseas are exempt from paying consumption tax if they follow certain procedures at licensed tax-free agencies (such as department stores, home appliance stores, discount stores and others) on condition that they are taken out of Japan.

Claiming the Japan 8% sales/consumption tax or VAT refund for shopping in Japan happens to be one of the most hassle experience. Like a typical sales tax refund for most countries like South Korea, there is no need to show Japan Customs, your products to obtain customs stamp and then claiming your tax refund via tax refund agents like Global Blue. Instead, in Japan, you can get cash refund directly and immediately from the tax refund counters at the shopping centres/malls or shops where you shopped at. But there was an issue. How do we make sure the foreigner who is claiming the tax refund is the same one who bought it?

With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in sight, the Japanese government is on the edge and has already aimed to simplify tax-free shopping by digitizing the paperwork. Foreign tourists who seek exemption from Japan's consumption tax currently needs evidence of purchase stapled to their passports to show customs while leaving. This not only makes the passports fatter, bulkier, but also raises the possibility of tearing the passports when detaching and this can amount to many sheets of paper altogether and its herculean task.

Now, the same retailers in Japan’s Tax free will now digitize passport related information of the foreign tourists using Accura Scan and accordingly send the information to National Tax Agency. At Accura Scan, we started this dream to replace manual data entry for important KYC documents in banks, travel agencies, government institutions all over the world like National ID cards, Citizenship cards, passports, bank cards, driving licenses with something which is very convenient and easy. Hence, we came up with Accura Scan.

You can check out more information about us here- https://accurascan.com/download Further, clients can register for free and generate SDK license and Web API keys for OCR and Face Recognition. Upon registration each user gets 100 KYC checks to evaluate the solution, this can be increased by sending us an email to connect@accurascan.com.