Several colleges around the country have revoked a policy that allowed students to wipe out demerits by collecting sales slips or invoices. Some parents had complained that the practice was unfair to students from less well-to-do families and could be counterproductive in moral terms.
People can win money if the numbers of their receipts match numbers drawn by the government in the bimonthly Uniform Invoices Lottery. The prizes range from a few hundred dollars to NT$2 million (US$60,000).
The Genesis Social Welfare Foundation and other civic groups and charities began collecting the invoices several years ago. It has become a common sight nationwide to see young people holding boxes and asking for invoices from passers by.
Some schools had allowed their students to receive a lesser punishment if they could collect a certain number of invoices. One report said that schools in Pingtung County collected more than 258,000 invoices last year alone.
Although the initial idea was to have the students help these charities raise funds, some parents were worried the practice was sending the wrong message to the students.
They wondered if collecting invoices from strangers as a punishment was effective in helping the students learn about humanitarian work or even understand what they did was wrong.
Some suspected that the schools were keeping the invoices to make money.
National Pingtung Senior High School has denied mishandling invoice collections, but agreed that some students had abused the policy by demanding invoices from classmates or family members.
A school in Taipei County said that instead of using the collection of invoices as a way to exact punishment, it had turned the collection into an competition between classrooms. This way, the school said, students would be collecting invoices to win points, not to avoid responsibility for their actions.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS