In Taiwan there is something called the "tax lottery." In the past a lot of shops and business would make a lot of sales off the books so that they don't have to pay taxes. To combat this, the government came up with a pretty clever idea. They decided to have special lottery numbers printed on all receipts. Customers can then use the number on their receipts to win a special "tax lottery." The idea is that this way customers will demand receipts, thus forcing there to be a record of all transactions a store makes.
Although some stores still don't give receipts, while in others you can get a cheaper price by offering to by it without getting a receipt. And some quite deviously will not give receipts to foreigners, thinking we don't know about it.In fact one of the first phrases I ever learned in Chinese was "GIVE ME MY RECEIPT!" with the implied anger hopefully teaching them to not try to cheat foreigners again.
The way to win is, you keep all your receipts, and then every two months the government has a list of about six sets of numbers, each eight digits long, from which you can win some money. The larger prizes require you to have all eight digits, but there are smaller prizes for having the last three, four, five, etc. digits. The largest prize is usually two million taiwan dollars (a bit over 67,000 usd) although recently there has been a prize of 10 million taiwan dollars (over 300,000 usd).
Sadly, i have never won that much money. About every half year I will win the lowest amount with is like six bucks. while once i win the twelve dollar prize.
This idea has really caught on in other areas as well. Some ATMs have their own lottery system as well. After you withdraw your money you can choose some numbers for your lottery number and later check their website to see if you won. This seems a good way to encourage people to choose one ATM over another. I never used this, but I must admit that some ATMs will let you choose from a list of coupons, so I used to go to only specific ATMs so I could get the coupons for some restaurants I like. Although my current bank doesn't allow free cash withdraws, so I just withdraw money from my bank's ATM which is free. Although....the transaction fee i save, is still much less than the coupon's discount. Seems like I should use the regular ATM anyway. Saving six dollars at a restaurant I like, is better than saving 30 cents in transaction fee.
Getting back to the tax lottery. It is also very useful for many charities. Most convenience stores have charity boxes for people to put their receipts in. The charities then pick them up and check the numbers to see if they've one. You will also see people around town collecting receipts for various charities as well. Although for better or for worse, most charities that accept volunteers, usually make new volunteers check the receipts, rather than do some of the "cooler" volunteer assignments.
Above is a picture of an event at a university to raise money. If you gave them two receipts, they would paint your portrait for you. While it seems nice, I wasn't going to give up a potential 67,000 bucks for a portrait. I mean I know I'm so handsome, but that's one expensive painting!
