Author: Chloe, PANews
The Taiwan Finance Department announced the winners of the July and August unified invoices (small tickets) at the beginning of the month, including 17 winners of NT$10 million and 20 winners of NT$2 million. Among them, the most eye-catching winner is the winner No. 2, who only spent NT$2 (less than RMB 0.5) in MaiCoin handling fees to win the NT$10 million prize.
MaiCoin also issued a statement to explain the incident. Generally speaking, when users trade virtual currencies on the platform, if the handling fee currency is in NTD, the decimal point will be rounded off, and a unified invoice will be issued if the amount reaches NTD 1. If the handling fee currency is in virtual currency (including the use of MAX Token for discount), it will be rounded off according to the current exchange rate to convert to NTD, and a handling fee invoice will be issued if it reaches NTD 1.
Taiwan’s unified invoice mechanism, will compliance also be blessed by the god of luck?
The purpose of Taiwan's unified invoice mechanism is nothing more than to encourage consumers to remember to ask for unified invoices when making purchases (because there is a chance to win a prize), and to prevent businesses from deliberately omitting to issue unified invoices, causing financial and tax losses to government agencies.
This initiative can benefit ordinary people, promote tax compliance, and has the greater appeal that anyone who spends money, no matter what they spend, has the opportunity to win generous cash.
The mechanism has many prize categories to ensure that a wide range of participants have a chance to win. The prize money is determined by the number of digits that match the winning number. The more digits a participant enters, the more likely they are to win the jackpot of tens of millions.
First, the grand prize is called the special prize, which usually requires matching all eight digits of the winning number. The prize usually awards millions or tens of millions of New Taiwan dollars in cash. Other prize categories include first prize, second prize, third prize, fourth prize, fifth prize, and other prize levels. Even if participants do not win the top prize, they still have the opportunity to win smaller cash prizes. In recent years, additional "digital prizes" have been introduced, which are specifically provided to users who use the application to access invoices. The introduction of this award is intended to encourage users to adopt digital receipts, thereby reducing reliance on paper receipts.
The invoice will look like this, which includes the store where the product was purchased, the month and year of the draw, and the most important invoice number. The rest is the purchase time and the total amount of the transaction. The final draw time will be the 25th of the month following each bimonthly period.
Regardless of whether it is a NT dollar transaction or a currency-to-currency transaction, as long as the user's transaction is successful, MaiCoin will only issue an invoice after the "daily" summary and settlement. In other words, if a user completes multiple transactions in a day, the transaction fees will be added up one by one, and an invoice will be issued based on the rounded amount.
However, MaiCoin also stated that every time a transaction is conducted on the platform, all profits earned by trading users and service fees collected are taxable events. Therefore, the most active users on the platform may have dozens or even hundreds of invoices each month.
However, the winning rate is very low even if there are dozens or hundreds of invoices, because people consume money on food, clothing, housing and transportation, and the accumulated number of invoices every month is considerable. Therefore, the number of invoices is large and the winning rate is extremely low.