diff --git a/nemo/collections/common/tokenizers/sentencepiece_tokenizer.py b/nemo/collections/common/tokenizers/sentencepiece_tokenizer.py
index 56a4b04dfe0f..45fbd4c8b328 100644
--- a/nemo/collections/common/tokenizers/sentencepiece_tokenizer.py
+++ b/nemo/collections/common/tokenizers/sentencepiece_tokenizer.py
@@ -237,6 +237,9 @@ def add_special_tokens(self, special_tokens):
                     self.special_token_to_id[token] = self.vocab_size
                     self.id_to_special_token[self.vocab_size] = token
                     self.vocab_size += 1
+                elif self.tokenizer.piece_to_id(token) != self.tokenizer.unk_id():
+                    self.special_token_to_id[token] = self.tokenizer.piece_to_id(token)
+
         elif isinstance(special_tokens, dict):
             for token_name, token in special_tokens.items():
                 setattr(self, token_name, token)
@@ -247,6 +250,8 @@ def add_special_tokens(self, special_tokens):
                     self.special_token_to_id[token] = self.vocab_size
                     self.id_to_special_token[self.vocab_size] = token
                     self.vocab_size += 1
+        else:
+            raise ValueError("Expected special_tokens to be a list or a dict " + str(type(special_tokens)))
 
     @property
     def pad_id(self):
diff --git a/nemo/collections/nlp/modules/common/tokenizer_utils.py b/nemo/collections/nlp/modules/common/tokenizer_utils.py
index 31bf493ec776..f066ade86811 100644
--- a/nemo/collections/nlp/modules/common/tokenizer_utils.py
+++ b/nemo/collections/nlp/modules/common/tokenizer_utils.py
@@ -169,6 +169,11 @@ def get_nmt_tokenizer(
             It has empirically been shown to improve inference time BLEU scores.
         r2l: Whether to return subword IDs from right to left
     """
+    import omegaconf
+    from omegaconf import OmegaConf
+
+    if isinstance(special_tokens, omegaconf.listconfig.ListConfig):
+        special_tokens = OmegaConf.to_container(special_tokens)
     if special_tokens is None:
         special_tokens_dict = {}
     else:
@@ -195,8 +200,10 @@ def get_nmt_tokenizer(
         from nemo.collections.common.tokenizers.sentencepiece_tokenizer import SentencePieceTokenizer
 
         logging.info(f'Getting SentencePiece with model: {tokenizer_model}')
+
         return SentencePieceTokenizer(
             model_path=tokenizer_model,
+            special_tokens=special_tokens,
             legacy=legacy,
             chat_template=chat_template,
         )
diff --git a/tests/collections/nlp/test_tokenizer_with_special_tokens.py b/tests/collections/nlp/test_tokenizer_with_special_tokens.py
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..d042231f6670
--- /dev/null
+++ b/tests/collections/nlp/test_tokenizer_with_special_tokens.py
@@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
+# Copyright (c) 2023, NVIDIA CORPORATION.  All rights reserved.
+#
+# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
+# you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
+# You may obtain a copy of the License at
+#
+#     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
+#
+# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
+# distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
+# WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
+# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
+# limitations under the License.
+
+
+from nemo.collections.nlp.modules.common.tokenizer_utils import get_nmt_tokenizer
+
+TOKENIZER_SPM_FILE = '/home/TestData/nlp/tokenizer_with_special_tokens/tokenizer.model'
+
+
+def test_spm_with_special_tokens() -> None:
+    special_tokens = [
+        '<s>',
+        '</s>',
+        '[INST]',
+        '[/INST]',
+        '[TOOL_CALLS]',
+        '[AVAILABLE_TOOLS]',
+        '[/AVAILABLE_TOOLS]',
+        '[TOOL_RESULTS]',
+        '[/TOOL_RESULTS]',
+    ]
+    tokenizer_cfg = {
+        "library": "sentencepiece",
+        "type": None,
+        "vocab_file": None,
+        "merge_file": None,
+        "delimiter": None,
+        "sentencepiece_legacy": True,
+        "special_tokens": special_tokens,
+    }
+    tokenizer = get_nmt_tokenizer(
+        library=tokenizer_cfg['library'],
+        model_name=tokenizer_cfg.get("type", None),
+        use_fast=tokenizer_cfg.get("use_fast", False),
+        delimiter=tokenizer_cfg.get("delimiter", None),
+        special_tokens=tokenizer_cfg.get("special_tokens", None),
+        trust_remote_code=tokenizer_cfg.get("trust_remote_code", False),
+        tokenizer_model=TOKENIZER_SPM_FILE,
+        legacy=True,
+    )
+
+    assert tokenizer.text_to_ids('[INST]') == [3]
+    for i, special_token in enumerate(special_tokens):
+        assert special_token in tokenizer.special_token_to_id, f'Expected {special_token} to be a special token'
+        assert tokenizer.special_token_to_id[special_token] == i + 1