Unified invoice lottery

One of the first things that will surprise you in Taiwan is that almost wherever you shop you will get an invoice for your purchase and all the invoices look more or less the same. Like the example on the right.

This is actually the so called Unified Invoice and it is a form of standardized receipt that is issued by shops and businesses required under its taxation laws by the Ministry of Finance. The common standard length and width for a Uniform Invoice is 4cm and 19cm respectively, regardless of the number of items purchased (so you can get various of these in the supermarket).

To encourage the public to enforce businesses to print Uniform Invoices to ensure the flow of taxation income, the Ministry of Finance has implemented that the eight-digit serial number, on the top of the Uniform Invoice, also serves as a lottery ticket with bi-monthly draws.

So, as a consumer you either keep all your tickets or you can also deposit them on various donating boxes around Taiwan that are linked to various charities organizations that will take the value of the prize.

The grand prize is NT$2 million (~47.000 Euros) but there are many small prizes for as little as last three matching numbers (NT$200) on the Uniform Invoice. On the 25th day of the month the results are published here. You can see the results of the last lottery here below (click to see it bigger)

Over the months we have won some little amounts (NT$200, aprox 4.7 Euros) and last month we won NT$1000 (23.57 Euros!) because we had the last four digits of the 22701838. The funny details is that the ticket is for NT$1(0,023 Euros), that was a photocopy that Anna made :)

Now we need to go to the post office to collect our price!