After cashback, the Lottery of receipts is about to arrive: here are some clarifications to avoid that our purchases do not serve to generate virtual tickets
We are missing a few days to January 1, 2021, when the second initiative of the Cashless Italy plan will be launched after the Cashback already started on December 8: the Lottery of receipts. An initiative that has the same purpose of Cashback, that is to put a brake on tax evasion, but with a different method: in this case, electronic payments are not required, but the receipt.
Not all purchases, however, will allow buyers to collect "virtual tickets" with which they can participate in the Lottery and try to win the many prizes (there is even an annual extraction with a prize of 5 million euros). Given the chaos and unpreparedness experienced with the launch of Cashback, therefore, the Customs and Monopolies Agency is already launching informative messages on the official Facebook page of the Lottery in order to prepare users and avoid controversy in January. In the last post, for example, it puts in black and white which purchases are not valid for the Lottery of the Scontrini, at least not in the initial phase of this initiative.
Lotteria degli Scontrini: gli acquisti che non valgono
To be sure that your purchases generate one or more virtual tickets of the lottery is first of all necessary that the purchase is of an amount at least equal to 1 euro: purchases of an amount less than one euro do not generate any ticket.
In the same way, online purchases do not generate tickets, because the lottery is linked to a receipt issued by a telematic cash register (which is found only in a physical store). For exactly the same reason, purchases for which you receive an electronic invoice instead of a receipt are not valid.
In general, however, no purchases made by companies or for the purposes of exercising a business, art or profession are valid. Only purchases for private shopping are valid.
The problem of the Fiscal Code and the Health Card
There is also a specific problem that prevents in some cases to generate virtual tickets of the Lottery of the Receipts. When the purchaser asks the shopkeeper to acquire his tax code for the purpose of any tax deductions or deductions: in this case you do not get tickets.
The same goes for purchases in pharmacies and parapharmacies, opticians, laboratories or even veterinarians if we ask to enter our Health Card: in all these cases the purchase already passes through another circuit for the purpose of registration for tax deductions and does not generate any ticket.
What will change in the future
The Customs Agency specifies that no tickets will be generated in case of electronic invoice, Tax Code or Health Insurance Card "in the start-up phase of the lottery". But it doesn't tell us how long this startup phase will last.
It's clear that this is a connection problem between computer systems, but no estimated timeframe for fixing this problem has yet been released. We'll just have to wait until 2021 and see if the Discount Lottery will hold up to the impact better than State Cashback did.