On the Federal Tax Authority’s own page explaining the new tiered excise model for sweetened drinks,
there is a rate table. It gives the medium-sugar band — 5 grams to under 8 grams per 100 ml — as
AED 0.97 per litre.
The Cabinet Decision in force says AED 0.79.
Two transposed digits, a 23% overstatement of a tax a business must actually charge, sitting on the tax
authority’s own guidance page. We checked it on 20 August 2026: the figure 0.79 does not appear anywhere in
the page’s visible text.
This column is not about that one error. It is about a pattern I have now watched repeat across a month
of fact-checking, and about what it costs a country that has genuinely earned a reputation for legislating
fast.
First, the concession
The UAE’s legislative machinery is not slow. It is unusually quick. A federal corporate tax regime was
designed and stood up in roughly two years. E-invoicing is running to a published timetable with named
decisions behind each step. When Economic Substance Regulations stopped serving their purpose, they were
discontinued rather than left to rot.
And when a law changes, the instrument itself appears promptly, in English, as a clean PDF on the
Ministry of Finance’s site. The legislative layer works.
The problem is one layer up — and it is the layer everybody actually reads.
Six examples, all checked on the same day
Nobody starts at the Official Gazette. They start at u.ae, or at a ministry topic page, or at whatever an
AI assistant surfaces — which is usually the same thing. Here is what those pages were saying on 20 August
2026.
One. The FTA’s excise page misstates the rate, as above. The same page describes the
governing Cabinet Decision as “issued by the Federal Tax Authority”. A Cabinet Decision is issued by the
Cabinet, on the Minister of Finance’s presentation. The Authority administers it. Page stamp: last updated
31 December 2025.
Two. The government portal still taxes a category that no longer exists. u.ae’s excise
page lists “carbonated drinks (excluding sparkling water)” as an excise good and gives “50 per cent on
carbonated drinks”, citing Cabinet Decision No. 52 of 2019. That decision was expressly repealed with effect
from 1 January 2026, and carbonation is no longer an excise category at all. The page has been wrong for
nearly eight months.
Three. The Small Business Relief guide still prints the old end date. The relief was
extended to 31 December 2029 by Ministerial Decision 131 of 2026, issued on 29 July. The FTA’s linked guide
is built entirely on the earlier decision and carries the superseded date.
Four. The FTA’s Economic Substance pages describe a discontinued regime in the present
tense. They still set out the Authority’s role in assessing compliance and imposing penalties,
still offer registration routes, and make no mention of the 2024 Cabinet Decision that cancelled the
reporting requirement. In fairness, the Ministry of Finance does list that decision among its instruments —
but its own page still states the filing obligation without an end date.
Five. A live government page links to a dead ministry. The u.ae business regulations
page carries two links to moec.gov.ae — the Ministry of Economy’s former domain. The ministry is now the
Ministry of Economy and Tourism, at moet.gov.ae. The links return HTTP 200 and land on a generic homepage,
silently discarding the path and the language.
Six. The same page names a regulator that no longer calls itself that. It sends readers
to the “Securities and Commodities Authority”. That body renamed itself the UAE Capital Market Authority
with effect from 1 January 2026; sca.gov.ae now redirects to uaecma.gov.ae, whose pages say Capital Market
Authority and never say Securities and Commodities Authority. The link works. The name is seven months out
of date.
The detail that removes the charitable reading
I went into this expecting the obvious explanation: government websites are large, nobody has got round
to it, this is ordinary institutional lag.
Then I looked at the date stamps.
The u.ae excise page carries “Updated on: 26 Mar 2026” — nearly three months after the law
changed. The business regulations page with the dead ministry link and the retired regulator name carries
“Updated on: 11 Aug 2026” — nine days before I checked it.
These are not abandoned pages. Somebody opened them, edited something, and saved them, while the repealed
decision and the dead link and the old regulator name stayed exactly where they were.
That is a different problem from neglect, and a more fixable one. A page can be updated without
being checked against the law. The review process is running; it simply is not a legal review.
Why this costs more than it used to
Ten years ago a stale government page was a minor inconvenience with a bounded blast radius. Someone read
it, acted on it, and their accountant caught the error.
That is no longer how the information travels.
UAE government guidance pages are now the training and retrieval corpus for the
systems most people ask first. When an
assistant is asked what excise rate applies to a fizzy drink in the UAE, it does not read Cabinet Decision
197 of 2025. It reads the pages above, which carry every marker of authority a machine can check — a
government domain, a recent date stamp, an HTTP 200 — and none of the markers that would reveal the answer
is wrong.
So the error does not sit on one page and wait. It is copied into consultancy blogs, summarised into
answers, and repeated back with the confidence that a .gov.ae citation confers. We have spent this month
correcting exactly that chain: the widely repeated claim that carbonated drinks are taxed at 50%, that Small
Business Relief ends in 2026, that Nawah operates Barakah, that the UAE’s data protection law has live
compliance deadlines. In each case the error’s origin was not a content farm. It was official.
The fix is cheap and boring
Two things would close most of this.
Separate “edited on” from “reviewed against the law on”. The date stamps are already
there, and they are a genuine virtue — they are the only reason this column can be written with dates
attached rather than as a complaint. But one stamp is doing two jobs. A second line reading “checked against
current legislation on…” would tell a reader, and a machine, what the first one cannot.
Put a superseded-by banner on the instrument, not just the topic page. When a decision is
repealed, the pages that cite it are knowable — they cite it by number. Flagging them is a search-and-replace
problem, not a policy problem.
Neither requires new law. Both are publishing hygiene.
What this is really about
The UAE has spent a decade building an argument that it is a serious, fast, well-run place to do business,
and the argument is largely true. Corporate tax, e-invoicing, the bankruptcy regime, the commercial agency
law, the data protection framework — the pace of reform is real and the drafting is public.
But a reform programme is only as credible as the answer a business owner gets when they check. Right now
the honest advice to anyone operating here is: do not rely on the guidance page, read the decision.
That is a strange thing to have to say about a country this well organised, and it is the one part of the
system that has not kept up with the rest.
Our guides to
Small Business Relief,
the 9%
corporate tax regime,
VAT registration,
investing on ADX and
business setup are all
written from the instruments rather than the summaries, for exactly this reason.
Every page cited here was fetched and read on 20 August 2026. If any of them has since been corrected,
that is a good outcome and this column has done its job.
Sources, all checked 20 August 2026: the Federal Tax Authority’s
tiered
volumetric model page and its
Economic Substance
Regulations pages; the text of
Cabinet
Decision No. 197 of 2025; the Ministry of Finance’s
announcement
of the ESR cancellation; the UAE Government portal’s
excise
tax page,
nuclear
energy page and
business
regulations page; and the
UAE Capital Market
Authority. This is an opinion column.
