Missing by one number is missing by a mile when it comes to winning the NT$10 million (US$339,000) Uniform Invoice lottery — just ask the author of a post on Facebook recently, whose invoice was off by one digit.
The lucky number for the Uniform Invoice lottery for November and December last year was announced on Jan. 25.
The Uniform Invoice system was first thought up in the 1950s to stabilize the government’s source of income.
The bi-monthly lottery, using 3 percent of annual business taxation as funding — as stipulated by Article 16 of the Measure Governing Uniform Invoice Lottery Prize (統一發票給獎辦法) — was introduced to encourage the public to ask for invoices and also preventing businesspeople from evading taxes.
The Ministry of Finance only launched the NT$10 million special prize for the Uniform Invoice lotteries last year and there have been 58 winners so far, with 43 who have already cashed in their prize.
The Facebook social group, Ku MEN Fans, shared the picture of the unlucky invoice on Monday, with the “editor” of the group saying: “There was once an honest chance placed in front of me, but I did not appreciate it; then I regretted most bitterly when I lost the chance, and there can be nothing more painful than this. If I may be given another chance, I would wish for … [NT$]10 million.”
The post sparked a discussion on Internet forums, with one contributor saying: “If I knew I would have cut in line no matter what.”
Cheng Liang-wen (鄭良文), the manager of the Taoyuan County FamilyMart that gave out the invoice that won the NT$10 million prize, said the winner won with the purchase of a NT$25 loaf of bread at 9am on Nov. 20.
Cheng said it was only after some customers talked about it on the day of the announcement of the lucky number that the clerk started looking through the store’s copy of the invoices and ascertained that the store was indeed the one that printed the invoice.
“A friend also wrote on my Facebook page that the netizen who posted on the Web saying his invoice was one digit off was his friend,” Cheng said
The friend also said that if the other person had bought something at the FamilyMart a minute earlier Chang could have also considered early retirement, Chang said.
Additional reporting by CNA
Translated by Jake Chung, staff writer
‘HUMILIATING’: Aletheia University students called on the school to apologize for limiting former professor Chang Liang-tse’s access to its Taiwan literature archive The Aletheia University Student Association yesterday called on the university to apologize to retired professor Chang Liang-tse (張良澤) after it prevented him from accessing the Taiwanese literature archive at its Tainan campus by changing the lock on the building. Last month, the university changed the lock on the building without warning, barring Chang’s access to the archive that he had “singlehandedly established,” Chung Yen-wei (鍾延威), the son of the late writer Chung Chao-cheng (鍾肇政), wrote on Facebook on Friday. The university in 1997 created the first department of Taiwanese literature in the nation, and Chang, now 82, was the department’s first-ever chairman,
ALLEVIATING FEARS: The CECC would only announce public places where it is difficult to identify everyone there at the same time as the couple, minister Chen said The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday announced six places where two locally infected COVID-19 cases had visited between Thursday last week and Sunday, urging people who had been at the places at the same time to monitor their health. The couple, cases 838, a doctor, and 839, his nurse girlfriend, were reported by the center on Tuesday. The doctor had treated a patient with COVID-19 last week before he began suffering symptoms on Friday, while the nurse began suffering symptoms on Saturday. They work in the same hospital in northern Taiwan, but the nurse had not worked with COVID-19 patients, so
SECOND RULING: Israeli-American Oren Shlomo Mayer refused to sign a court transcript, complained about the court translator and said the trial had been unfair The High Court yesterday upheld New Taipei City District Court’s verdicts on four men convicted last year in connection with the 2018 murder and dismemberment of a Canadian citizen on the banks of the Sindian River (新店溪). It found American-Israeli Oren Shlomo Mayer and American Ewart Odane Bent guilty of homicide and the abandonment and destruction of a corpse, with Mayer sentenced to life in prison and Bent given a term of 12 years and six months, for the death of Sanjay Ryan Ramgahan, whose body parts were found in a riverside park under Zhongzheng Bridge in New Taipei’s Yonghe
A lawyer and a prosecutor yesterday castigated what they called a lenient ruling by the High Court on Luo Wen-shan (羅文山), whose prison sentence was reduced to two years, which he does not need to serve, after he was convicted for receiving illegal political donations from China to meddle in Taiwan’s elections. Investigators found that Luo, who retired from the army with the rank of lieutenant general, had accepted NT$8.38 million (US$294,604 at the current exchange rate) under the guise of political contributions from Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference member Xu Zhiming (許智明) and people in Hong Kong from 2008 to
RSS