From The Economist,
Governments around the world are encouraging consumers to ask for receipts by turning them into lottery tickets. Taiwan was an early experimenter, in 1951. The past decade has seen a flurry of such schemes: China, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania and Slovakia all now have them. Latvia will launch one later this year. The aim is to make it harder for retail businesses to evade taxes... The problem is not business-to-business transactions; firms can usually reclaim any vat they pay if they keep proper records. But when selling direct to consumers, it is tempting to accept cash without recording the sale... The idea of a receipt-lottery scheme is to give customers an incentive to ask for receipts, thereby forcing sales to be recorded and taxed. Receipts might be printed with a code that can then be submitted into a central draw. Prizes range from decent sums of money to cars and holidays. Digital technology means schemes are cheap to run, even allowing for the cost of prizes... According to a report for the European Commission in 2017, of the ten European countries with the biggest shortfalls in collection of vat in 2014-15, nine have, or are setting up, a receipt-lottery scheme. (Italy is the exception.)
There is little doubt that it will, in most places, have some impact. The degree of impact, and cost-effectiveness, though will depend. For example, complementing this with rigorous data analytics and strong enforcement can potentially have significant impacts.
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