Better Luck Next Time

 I’ve always said that playing the lottery is the only voluntary tax in the world. When I’m being especially cynical, I’ve been known to call it “the idiot tax” because of the terrible odds that are stacked in the house’s favor.  I’ve bought a handful of scratchers in my life (as a rule, never from a state in which I reside) and I’ve never once bought a traditional pick-your-family-members’-birthday-numbers lotto ticket.  This is probably why I’ve been obsessed with the Taiwan lotto ever since we’ve moved here.

The Taiwanese lotto is unlike anything I’ve ever heard of – the biggest difference being that you don’t buy tickets.  Every single receipt that you get from any store, no matter how small the purchase, acts as a lotto ticket.  So naturally, Taiwanese people cherish their receipts and never dare toss one in the trash as they leave a store.  The winnings can be as much as $10 million NTD (about $300,000 USD).  Not bad. 

Why on earth would the Taiwanese government give away millions to people just for having their receipts?  The genius behind the lottery system is that it makes receipts valuable to customers, so they demand, or at least expect, that they get a receipt for every purchase.  If stores print receipts for every purchase, thereby entering it into their registers, every purchase can be taxed.  The lottery system is a clever way to keep all transactions “on the books” so that businesses can’t hide revenue from the government.  Millions may be given away to the winners, but the real winner is the government since very few transactions are not officially recorded and taxed. The lottery system basically turns each customer into an auditor or enforcer of the tax code.  I may not care if a business reports all of its income, but I damn well want my receipt that may be worth 10 million!

The actual lottery is pretty simple.  They draw a series of eight digit numbers.  Each receipt has a unique eight digit number (this takes some coordination – which is why it is called the “Uniform Invoice Lottery”) that is printed on the top of the receipt.  Match the grand prize or special prize exactly, and you win the jackpot of $10 million.  If you match the last seven digits, you get $40,000, match the last six and you get $10,000 and so on.  Just matching the last three digits will get you $200 (about $6.50), which is at least a decent dinner.    Since there are five numbers that only require matching the last three numbers, each receipt has a 1/200 chance of winning.  That doesn’t sound great, but the lottery is held every two months, so you are bound to have 200 receipts and have at least one winner.  That is, if you are lucky.

Apparently, I’m not very lucky.  At least not yet.  I probably spoiled my luck by half-jokingly obsessing over the $10 million grand prize for the last two weeks.  For some reason I had an irrational belief that we would win big.  I even did the math on the odds of the grand prize.  23,000,000 people x 1 reciept per day x 60 days = 1.38 Billion receipts.  Since there is probably an average of more than one receipt per day per person, I have less than a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance of winning the grand prize.  I guess since everything else has been working out so well here, I just assumed the luck would continue.  I’ll just have to cherish my good fortune in other areas and keep collecting receipts for the November 25^th numbers.  

Wish us luck!