The constitution in this country stipulates that a certain percentage of the annual government budget must be allocated to education. Therefore, we don't have a similar problem.
But according to current regulations for the lottery, 50 percent of lottery revenue will be given to local governments, another 45 percent will be used as reserves for a national annuity (
My personal view is that because the public welfare lottery should be used for welfare, the 50 percent contribution to local governments poses a question of whether the money will actually be used for welfare programs instead of other expenses, such as personnel or general expenses.
A better way is to enact new laws to govern the use of lottery revenue, such as subsidies for the poor and handicapped. But it is a task for the Legislative Yuan and media to pursue in the future.
TT: Local media have been questioning the transparency of the lottery draws. Could you explain why it takes three hours to announce prize winners after a draw?
Yang: Taiwan's lottery draw does not take longer when compared with other countries. For example, the recent NT$6.7 billion lottery jackpot in California announced the winning numbers at about 7pm, and the winners were not announced until 10am the next day.
In addition, it actually takes just about one and half hours to process the (20 million to 40 million) lottery numbers. But the computer system only starts to run the batch processing after 9pm, when the ticket retailers close their shops. It takes another half hour to verify the accuracy of the computer report.
So it only takes about two hours to complete the process. The reason the draws cannot be postponed to 9pm is that the (Power TV) television station wants to attract the most audience at 8pm, or else we could shorten the process to around 10pm on draw nights.
The technical reason that it takes one and half hours to process are that there are two sets of programs that need to be run. The first one is from GTECH Corp, the US lottery system provider, and the other one was developed by TaipeiBank to verify the accuracy of the first program for the winning list.
Only when the reports of the two match each other will the TaipeiBank release the winning list. It's unlikely that any tickets can be added after 7pm on Tuesday and Friday, when the lottery is closed. There's a time-stamp on each ticket stating when it was issued and where it was sold. All the records and files will be sealed for 15 years and audited by regulatory agencies, including the Ministry of Finance, which oversees the lottery.
Also, the court can issue a request to verify the records.
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