The Government of Mexico City has announced that lottery winners will no longer pay a 6% tax on prizes. The initiative emerged to encourage people to buy tickets for the ‘presidential plane raffle’, which took place yesterday and aimed to give 100 different people around a million dollars.
The Head of Government Claudia Sheinbaum Prado established that the resources obtained from that draw will be used to acquire new medical equipment, in order to strengthen the national health system during the pandemic.
The tax will be valid until December 31, 2020, and winners will be able to request the benefit before that date. If they don’t apply, “they will lose their rights to claim it as it won’t be retroactive.”
The Government expects to collect around $145m in revenue from the sale of the lottery tickets. The Director of the national lottery Ernesto Prieto Ortega recently confirmed that, if they don’t find the winners, the prize will be directed to the Institute of Health and Wellbeing (Insabi).
In August, the lottery requested authorization from the Ministry of finance to invest $1.5m to update the machines it uses to carry out the draws. According to the entity, 24.13% of the machines “are useless”, as they have broken glass, they’re scratched and some parts are worn and they have cables in poor condition.
Currently, technicians only clean and check the screws and oil the automatic pieces, even though the Lotería Nacional spends around $60m a year in maintenance.
