The Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office says it will return the price of the lotto ticket to P20 from P24 to attract more bettors to the numbers game.
“We restructured the price based on the suggestions of our agents and the gaming public. We made a study and analysis and it’s viable,” PCSO General Manager Royina Garma said in a statement on Sunday.
“We will roll back to P20 and this already includes the VAT [value-added tax]."
The agency increased the price of the lotto ticket to P24 from P20 in 2018 to comply with the implementation of the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion Law, which also imposed VAT on the numbers game.
The PCSO is also looking at revising the regulations in giving out the second-prize payout to winners.
Garma says the plan for the second-prize winners is for each of them to get their prize in full instead of splitting the total prize among the number of winners.
The second-prize winners are those who correctly guessed five of the six winning digits.
“Except for the jackpot prize, whatever is the amount of the consolation prize is also what our winning bettors will get,” Garma said in a radio interview.
The reduction in the lotto ticket price is seen to get more people to buy lotto tickets, which should result in higher revenues for the PCSO.
The agency has been affected by the cessation of lotto and other games, such as the Keno and the small-town lottery games, due to the enhanced community quarantine.
Recently, the PCSO also reduced the fee for those wishing to become authorized agents of its games to help those who lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A potential authorized agent pays a one-time application fee of P2,500 and he or she becomes a lotto, Keno, and Sweepstakes agent.