The much anticipated lottery of plastic money transactions was finally conducted on Thursday evening. One thousand lucky taxpayers shared 1,000,000 euros and each one will see €1,000 on its bank account, thus tax-free.
The total number of transactions participated in the lottery amounted to 8,254,535, corresponding to 4,556,328 tax payers registration numbers (AFM).
Likewise, 4,556,328 internet users tried to check the lottery results on the website of the Independent Authority for Public Revenues (aade.gr) and brought it down for about one hour.
The total value of transactions per credit/debit card and e-banking was € 2,093,786,015.92. The transactions participating in the lottery were done in the month of October. However, some media claimed that not all of October transactions took part in the lottery on Nov 30 as banks sent data also in November..
A total 1,074,332,777 lottery numbers were drawn.
The lucky winners will be informed with a personalized message in their taxisnet account and will have to claim the prize within 3 months. IAPR officials said that winners have to submit the bank IBAN of the account they want the money to be booked at.
If they don’t claim the money, 1,000 back up lottery ‘winners’ are on waiting list of the IAPR.
Each winner is assigned to 1,000 euro, even if two or more transactions receipts were drawn in the lottery.
According to the plans of the finance ministry to combat tax evasion by giving incentives to consumers one lottery is scheduled to take place each month.
As the lottery scheme was voted in 2016 and the first draw took place in November, authorities plan another Big lottery in December for 10,000 winners to share 10,000,000 euros. The lottery will refer to transactions between January and September 2017.
Deputy Finance Minister Katerina Papanatsiou stressed that the increase in the use of plastic money (credit, debit, prepaid cards, e-banking) led to the first positive results in the fight against tax evasion. Value Added Tax revenues increased by 20% -.i.e. by 2billion euros) in the first nine months of 2017, compared to the corresponding period of 2015 (or by two billion euros)
