Foreign firms like Switzerland’s Sicpa quietly control vital state functions—tax enforcement, currency authentication, and digital tracking—posing serious risks to national sovereignty with little transparency or public oversight.

    Big Tech’s tightening grip on American life has become impossible to ignore. From Silicon Valley’s selective censorship to TikTok’s opaque data harvesting, the public knows the dangers of surrendering digital infrastructure to unaccountable corporate actors. Yet while all eyes remain fixed on Beijing’s influence operations, quieter forces are burrowing deeper into the machinery of state sovereignty, not just in the United States, but across the globe.

    One such actor is Sicpa, a Swiss firm with an oversized role in how nations authenticate their currencies, enforce taxes, and increasingly, shape the future of money itself.

    What Is Sicpa?

    Founded in Lausanne, Switzerland, Sicpa earned its historical reputation by producing high-security inks in banknotes, including US dollars and euros. However, over the past two decades, Sicpa has evolved into something more expansive and far more powerful. Today, it acts as a silent gatekeeper to state sovereignty, managing how governments authenticate currency, regulate excise taxes, track goods, and even think about the future of digital money.

    Through its flagship platform, SICPATRACE, the company provides governments with end-to-end systems for digitally tracking and tracing excisable goods such as tobacco, alcohol, fuel, and pharmaceuticals across the supply chain. These systems are deployed in over 20 countries, allowing tax authorities to monitor in real-time what is produced, where that product travels, and who ultimately purchases it.

    In principle, such a system promises to combat illicit trade and boost state revenues. In reality, it gives a private foreign corporation significant access to national data and a critical role in domestic revenue enforcement without the transparency or accountability that such power warrants.

    Unlike publicly traded firms, Sicpa remains a privately held, family-owned enterprise. It does not disclose the full extent of its government contracts or submit to shareholder scrutiny. Worse still, Sicpa rarely grants media interviews. And yet, from Latin America to Eastern Europe, it has become a silent but powerful infrastructural player, embedded deep within national fiscal systems, excise monitoring, and, increasingly, digital identity and currency architecture.

    In effect, Sicpa operates not merely as a contractor but as a quasi-sovereign entity within the economic frameworks of the states it serves.

    How Powerful Is Sicpa?

    This is not theoretical.

    Consider Turkey, the first country to adopt Sicpa’s technology, SICPATRACE, to monitor excise goods. Sicpa’s influence expanded further through the TurkTrace system and the administration of cultural sector revenues. This gave the company oversight of how taxable goods are tracked and even how tourism-generated public funds are collected. Concerns have been raised over the opacity of these arrangements, the costs passed to taxpayers, and the extensive access to trade and fiscal data, all core pillars of national sovereignty.

    The implications for the United States should not be ignored.

    This isn’t just about security ink or tracking stamps. It is about expanding a model of governance where critical state functions like tax enforcement, customs compliance, and identity verification are outsourced to private technology firms with little public oversight. Congress should formally review foreign technology vendors embedded in the US regulatory infrastructure, particularly in areas sensitive to revenue collection, currency issuance, and supply chain tracking.

    Agencies such as the IRS, the Department of the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve should be required to conduct detailed risk assessments before entering into agreements involving third-party digital compliance or authentication systems.

    Furthermore, public disclosures should be mandated for all contracts involving firms that operate in these sovereign domains.

    The American investment group Atlas Holdings is acquiring De La Rue, a British banknote maker. This takeover presents more than just a business transaction; it is a rare opportunity for the US to reclaim strategic control over critical components of national and global financial infrastructure. De La Rue’s expertise in currency design, anti-counterfeiting technology, and secure document printing makes it a linchpin in the architecture of state-level monetary sovereignty.

    Bringing this capability under American ownership would allow for greater oversight, transparency, and alignment with domestic standards in deploying these systems, thus reducing reliance on foreign vendors. The acquisition could also serve as a strategic counterbalance to actors like Sicpa, signaling a shift toward reclaiming sovereign control over the tools that shape modern governance.

    For the US to fully control its sovereignty, we must ensure that preference is granted to domestic firms in sensitive areas such as tax compliance. With digitalization erasing borders, even the most considerable powers like the US become vulnerable to foreign influence. Sometimes, these ambitions can come from Beijing, and other times from a seemingly benign boardroom in Switzerland.