TIRANA, Jan. 12 – Alongside a crackdown against fiscal evasion launched last fall, Albanian authorities are hoping to instill a culture of asking for and saving receipts of purchased goods among citizens by appealing to a desire for more money.
Albania’s Ministry of Finance has announced it will run a fiscal receipt lottery involving several cash prizes and so far people seem to have taken the bait.
As a matter of fact, queues of people rushing to send envelopes containing their sales receipts were registered at post offices across the country as the deadline for submitting receipts via mail approached, while on a first glance the initiative seems to have done the trick.
Participation in the lottery requires collecting at least 50 receipts printed between Nov. 15 through Dec. 15, 2015 with the amount on each receipt being at least Euro 0.70 and sending them via mail for official entry.
The lottery’s top prize is set at Euro 7,130, while it also foresees ten other so-called big prizes set at Euro 713 each. Winners for these prizes will not be chosen randomly, instead they will be based on a formula involving the number of coupons collected and the total value of the receipts which practically translates as the higher the value on the receipts and the more receipts submitted, the higher the chances of hitting it big. Meanwhile, hundreds of other minor prizes will be selected randomly via a drawing to be broadcast on national televisions, according to Albania’s Ministry of Finance.
Informality has reigned almost undisturbed in post-communist Albania, despite efforts to tackle the issue in the past. The previous government issued orders to supply all businesses with cash registers, and while for the most part businesses complied and were supplied with the cash machines, the latter only served mostly as furniture items rather than their designated function with many vendors still refusing to print receipts to clients.
Faced with falling revenues, the Albanian government decided to launch a sweeping campaign against the grey economy last September, which also involved stiff penalties for businesses that failed to provide fiscal receipts to customers.
Customers could also be fined for failure to obtain a receipt prior to leaving the store. While steps forward have been taken in this aspect, still many businesses especially outside the Albanian capital Tirana continue to dodge the rules.
In this aspect, Albanian authorities are hoping that the lottery will create a public habit of demanding for a receipt whenever they purchase merchandize, which in turn will help reduce informality.
In the early 90s after communism fell, driven by poverty and unemployment many Albanians viewed gambling as a way to get rich quick, although it must be said that the industry hasn’t been the domain of the poor alone ever since.
The appeal of get-rich quick schemes with little to no effort was difficult for Albanians to resist when several Ponzi schemes began offering extremely high returns on investments in a very short period of time in the mid-90s. Their collapse in 1997 saw many Albanians lose their savings as well as property after investing in those schemes.
Bingo parlors also used to be pretty popular and a common sight at the time with main cities in Albania having several ones.
After bingo parlors fell out of favor, they were later replaced by betting shops and casinos, littering almost every neighborhood in the country with the Albanians once more ‘renewing their love vows’ to the industry. Meanwhile, the government’s gamble that the lottery would attract the interest of Albanians based on their affinity for striking it rich quick appears to have borne fruit.
