After eating at a restaurant, every new visitor to China wonders why the waiter gives them a small stack of colorful receipts when they pay their bill. Unlike Western receipts, which are typically an itemized invoice or a credit card receipt, Chinese receipts come in several colors and have silver scratch-able areas on them. In fact, they resemble lottery scratch-offs. "What ARE these?" visitors often ask. That, we answer, is how the Chinese government makes sure that customers will ask for tax receipts that restaurant owners often do not want to give!
Most restaurants in China operate on a cash basis and those restaurants taking card payments prefer debit cards to credit cards. This cash economy has made it very difficult for the Chinese government to accurately tax the restaurant businesses, so it needed a system that would drive customers to ask for government-issued tax receipts from the restaurant owners.
Their answer was to put a lottery ticket on each tax receipt and to enact a regulation requiting businesses to submit these tax receipts for any meals claimed as a business expense. The lottery on these receipts makes people ask for the receipts, because although the chances of winning are small and the rewards range from five to two-hundred RMB, people still think it is lucky to win. And of course, businesses will force their employees to submit the receipts with their expense reimbursements. Both these measures made it much easier for the government to properly tax food and beverage businesses.
So the next time you eat or drink in China, try your luck by asking for and scratching the tax receipts!
(selected from 101 Stories for Foreigners to Understand Chinese People by Yi S. Ellis and Bryan D. Ellis, published by China Intercontinental Press in 2012)