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EU states introduce lotteries to boost VAT compliance

  • Jan 24, 2015 | Richard Asquith

EU states introduce lotteries to boost VAT compliance

The European Commission last week published its review of the growing trend by member states to offer cash lotteries based on fully compliant VAT invoices to encourage compliance and reduce fraud.

The tax receipt lotteries offer the holders of fully compliant invoices the chance to win cash prizes in regular lotteries. They therefore encourage companies to record all transactions and fully charge VAT. Whilst lotteries do help promote full disclosure of all transactions, there are questions about the morality of such programmes, and the right to use and pool information gathered from the lottery process for tax investigations.

Currently, Portugal, Slovakia and Malta run such schemes. Greece has plans to introduce one soon. A number of other non-EU European countries do too.


VP Global Indirect Tax
Richard Asquith
VP Global Indirect Tax Richard Asquith
Richard Asquith is the former VP Global Indirect Tax at Avalara