Latvia to launch receipt lottery next year

Latvia’s State Revenue Service jointly and the state-owned lottery company Latvijas Loto will launch a receipt lottery in the country next year. The lottery will have weekly draws, offering 10 cash prizes of 200 euros each, and monthly draws offering 3000 euros.

The lottery is planned for receipts higher than 5 euros excluding value-added tax (VAT). The Latvian citizens need to register their receipts online, recording details such as the location they got the receipt and the phone number to contact them in case of the winning. There are no age restrictions for this lottery.

The lottery will not be cheap for Latvia: the development of a special IT-system will require 200 thousand euros, and the prize fund and administrative expenses will cost 250 thousand euros in 2019 and 2020. But the authorities plan that they will receive more from this venture than they will spend to implement it.

State Revenue Service expect that the receipt lottery will help in the fight against shadow economy and result in additional 3 million euro of taxes. The Latvian Government instructed the Ministry of Finance to increase the forecast of VAT revenues in 2019–2020 by 2.95 million euros. Latvians will start to ask for checks and thus help the State Revenue Service to deal with unregistered cash flow, and thus, Latvia will improve fair trade and fair payment of taxes.

Source: e-playonline.com