Taiwan Govt. encourages lottery cloud receipts with increased prizes

Taiwan's Ministry of Finance will increase the number of prizewinners for the March-April uniform invoice lottery exclusively for cloud receipt holders.

Finance Minister Su Jain-rong said Thursday at a legislative session that the move is to encourage people to ask for cloud receipts when they shop, Focus Taiwan reports. He informed that as of the end of March, cloud receipts accounted for 38.4% of all electronic receipts, adding that the ministry is pushing to increase the proportion to 40% by the end of the year and further to 45 percent in the future.

Starting with the March-April uniform invoice lottery draw, to be held May 25, the number of cloud-based uniform invoice receipts eligible to win the NT$500 (USD17.94) prize will climb from 600,000 to 1 million, Su Jain-rong said. Also, the minister increased the number of receipts that win NT$1 million from 15 to 30 and the number of receipts that can win NT$2,000 from 15,000 to 16,000 in the January-February uniform invoice lottery draw. So the total number of winners for the prizes available only to cloud receipt holders will exceed 1.01 million, according to the minister.

The ministry will also introduce a brand new NT$800 prize in the July-August cloud uniform invoice lottery draw, he added.

Unlike the regular draw for paper receipts, which base their prizes on randomly drawn serial numbers, the draw for cloud uniform invoices is directly selected from paperless receipts that are stored in the cloud.

Winners will be able to redeem their awards using the "uniform lottery redemption" app, which can store and check receipts and enables winners to claim their prizes through electronic transactions, with the prize money remitted directly into their bank accounts.