Paid by QR in Nepal? Where your IRD prize coupon actually is, app by app

The bakery in Chabahil came to Rs 620, and the QR did what QR always does: a chime, a green tick, a balance Rs 620 lighter. Then came the part nobody had rehearsed. Somewhere in that transaction the government had supposedly issued a lottery ticket in my name, and there was no obvious place in the app to go and look at it.

That gap between being entered and being able to see it is the whole story of the digital side of Nepal's bill lottery. The scheme itself and the cash-bill portal are documented. What happens between tapping a merchant QR and a 12-digit coupon existing somewhere is not.

The one sentence that enters you

The procedure that governs all of this is six scanned pages signed under the Financial Procedures and Fiscal Responsibility Act 2076. Clause 5(1) reads, in full:

भुक्तानी सेवा प्रदायक मार्फत भएको विद्युतीय भुक्तानीबाट गरिएको खरिद कार्यक्रममा स्वतः समावेश हुनेछ।

A purchase made by electronic payment through a payment service provider shall be automatically included. That is the entire legal basis for the automatic path, and it is worth noticing what it does not do.

Clause 2 carries nine definitions, and भुक्तानी सेवा प्रदायक is not among them. The closest is 2(ज), which defines विद्युतीय भुक्तानी circularly as a payment made through an electronic payment service provider. Two other definitions do real work: 2(च) defines बीजक as an invoice issued by a person registered with a PAN, and 2(ङ) defines प्रणाली as a system operated by the Department.

Read all eleven clauses and a stranger fact emerges. The procedure imposes no duty on a payment service provider at all. No data specification, no timing requirement, no penalty. Every clause addresses the Department, its offices, or you. The only automation language is clause 5(3), which promises स्वचालित प्रमाणीकरण, automatic verification, of whatever arrives.

Coupon issuance stays with IRD. Clause 4(3) grants one उपहार टिकट per qualifying purchase, generated by the प्रणाली, and प्रणाली is defined as the Department's. Your bank does not mint the number. It receives it.

The pipe runs through the switch, not your wallet

If the procedure puts no duty on providers, something else must. Two Nepal Rastra Bank circulars, issued a day apart, split the work in a way that explains almost every complaint about this scheme.

The second one is the architectural key. It goes to the switch layer, the operators behind the QR rails, and its entire technical mandate is the phrase अन्तरआबद्धता कायम गर्ने, establish interconnection. One page, no annex, no field list, no cadence, no API contract, nothing on what customer data may travel or how long IRD keeps it.

That last silence matters, because IRD's portal reveals what it actually holds against every automatically generated coupon: the issuer identifier, the network identifier, an MCC code, the seller's PAN and business name, the transaction amount, the bill number and date, and the payer's PAN, name and mobile number. Merchant-category data does not live in your wallet. It lives at the switch. The published winners lists use the column header "Payer Name", which is payment-rail vocabulary, not tax-return vocabulary.

Notice the first circular, too. It obliged providers to publish an FAQ. It never obliged them to show you the coupon. Everything downstream follows from that omission.

Where the coupon actually is, app by app

IRD's portal answers this question by naming three possible places at once. Select the electronic payment option on the registration form and it returns, in both languages:

पुरस्कार कुपन कोडका लागि आफ्नो बैंकिङ वा वालेट एपको कारोबार विवरण, सूचना वा कुपन/रिवार्ड खण्ड हेर्नुहोस्।

Check the transaction details, notifications, or coupon/rewards section of your banking or wallet app. That is a government portal admitting it does not know which screen your provider used. And there is no fallback: the portal has no coupon lookup for digital entries, by mobile number, PAN or transaction ID. Its live API exposes only fiscal years, winners, and write-only endpoints for enrolments and claims. Even the दर्ता इतिहास tab for manually keyed bills is browser localStorage, so clearing your browser erases your own record.

Here is where the coupon has actually been confirmed, as of 22 August 2026.

Three different design choices for one national scheme: a dedicated section, a menu, or a line buried in transaction history. Exactly the split IRD's own hedge predicted.

One warning about searching for this yourself. A site called irdcoupon.com ranks well and self-declares as an unofficial third-party app with no government affiliation. Its per-bank instructions are demonstrably wrong on at least four banks, including telling you Siddhartha has a section the bank itself says is unbuilt. Search summaries keep laundering its guesses back as fact.

What "15 days" means, and the question IRD has not answered

The number 15 attaches to three unrelated things here, which is most of the confusion.

Your QR payment buys a ticket in the fortnight the purchase falls in. What nobody has published is whether a coupon from the 3rd competes only for the third day's Rs 1,33,334, or against every coupon in the fortnight, sixteen times over.

The evidence pulls both ways. IRD's live API labels each Daily Prize draw with an eligibility range covering the whole fortnight, headed योग्य कारोबार मितिहरू, while awarding one prize per day. Director General Dr Bhishma Kumar Bhusal described the method only as क्रिप्टोग्राफिकली सेक्युर्ड युनिफर्म र्यान्डम स्याम्पलिङ, uniform random sampling, with no mention of stratifying by day. The one document that answers the question plainly is eSewa's FAQ, published under the NRB mandate, which says one daily winner for each eligible day. That is a payment provider's paraphrase, not a statement from IRD.

Nothing in the procedure, notice 13598, or the portal resolves it. The portal has no FAQ at all. Asked how the selection worked, IRD's information officer Keshav Raghuvanshi said the Department itself did not know:

अहिले यसबारे हामीलाई पनि थाहा हुँदैन, मन्त्रालयले गरेको हो, पहिलोचोटी भएकाले पनि धेरै कुरामा प्रस्ट भइसकेका छैनौं।

Both draws were opened by Finance Minister Dr Swarnim Wagle at the Ministry, and clause 3(3) permits handing the programme to an event organiser. Either way the practical rule is the same: one coupon per qualifying transaction, and more qualifying transactions mean more tickets.

The first fortnight had no visible coupons at all

Line up the dates and the first draw looks impossible.

The first eligibility window ran 17 to 31 July 2026 (Shrawan 1 to 15). NRB ordered the switches to interconnect on 31 July, the last day of that window. Provider apps went live from 6 August. The draw was announced on 7 August.

So the entire first window closed before a single app could show anybody anything, and the draw ran wholly on backfilled switch data. That also explains a jump in IRD's own numbers that has never been reconciled publicly: on 3 August the Department put eligible transactions for that window at about 10.83 lakh, of which 10,74,796 came from QR. By the draw four days later the same window's QR pool was reported at 2,56,08,094 transactions worth Rs 76 arba 60 crore. Data kept arriving after the window shut.

The second window, 1 to 16 August, had visible automatic entry for roughly eleven of its sixteen days.

Never register a QR bill by hand

Because coupons appeared late or not at all, people assumed the automatic path had failed and keyed the same bill into the portal. IRD's response to that is unforgiving. Raghuvanshi again:

सिस्टमले झुक्केर भएको हो कि लोभमा गरिएको हो भनेर छुट्ट्याउँदैन। एउटा कारोबारको एउटा मात्र कुपन हुनुपर्छ। दोहोरो दर्ता भेटिनेबित्तिकै दुवै कुपन रद्द हुन्छन्।

The system does not distinguish an honest slip from greed. One transaction, one coupon, and both are cancelled the moment a duplicate is found. This is not theoretical: IRD withheld two coupons from the first winners list because they needed further investigation.

The portal blocks the obvious version of this anyway. Its manual form is cash-only, with a server-side rejection for electronic payments. The trap is for anyone who selects cash on a bill they actually paid by QR.

When a QR payment earns you nothing

The statute is broad and the implementation is narrow, and the gap is where coupons go missing.

Clause 5(1) would cover any payment through any payment service provider. IRD's portal recognises exactly two methods, नगद and विद्युतीय (QR/कार्ड), and every bank press release describes merchant QR specifically. Machhapuchchhre's was the most explicit, limiting automatic inclusion to digital payment made to a bank or wallet Merchant QR. The narrowing to QR and card has no published legal instrument behind it.

• Personal QR does not count. Payments to a personal account or an unregistered wallet account may not qualify. Merchant accounts show a merchant name on the confirmation screen; personal ones do not.
• The merchant's PAN must be on file with the acquiring bank. Fonepay CEO Diwas Kumar: the system will not recognise the payment until the correct PAN number is provided. Transactions up to Rs 5,000 a day are possible through some merchant QR accounts without a PAN, and those payments may not qualify.
• VAT registration is irrelevant. Clause 2(च) and 4(5)(ङ) require only a PAN. Reports that participants or vendors must be VAT-registered are wrong.
• CBMS never appears. The words केन्द्रीय बीजक अनुगमन and CBMS occur nowhere in the procedure, the notices, or the portal. Budget point 70(ख) does push businesses above Rs 10 crore turnover that issue electronic invoices into CBMS, a conditional duty routinely misquoted as covering all Rs 10 crore businesses, but nothing ties it to this draw.
• connectIPS and card-at-POS are unevidenced. IRD's taxonomy names कार्ड, yet no source describes an actual POS swipe producing a coupon, and connectIPS is never mentioned anywhere.

The Rs 100 floor has a genuine edge case. Clause 4(1) says एक पटकमा एक सय रुपैयाँ भन्दा बढी, more than Rs 100 in one instance. IRD's own portal code tests for 100 or above and says कम्तीमा, at least. An exactly-Rs-100 purchase is ineligible by law and accepted by IRD's software. On the digital path the figure the system holds is the payment amount from the switch, not the invoice total, which is a distinction that only surfaces at claim time when the two have to match.

Clause 4(5) rules out four categories, lettered क, ख, घ and ङ because the printed original skips ग: business purchases, invoices in a government or public body's name, telephone, internet, electricity, vehicles and transport, air tickets, and purchases from a seller without a PAN. Who enforces that on an automatic QR payment is unstated. IRD holds an MCC code against every coupon, so category screening is technically available, but no source says it happens and no excluded-MCC list is published. Worth knowing because Khalti's own marketing claims that recharges and bill payments qualify, and clause 4(5)(घ) excludes exactly those.

Claiming still runs on paper

Winning digitally does not spare you the counter.

IRD's API enforces the clock literally. The first draw, published 7 August, carried a claim deadline of 22 August and is now closed. The second, published 17 August, closes 1 September.

Two things to watch. The original paper bill stays mandatory even for digital payers, and the portal's online claim form contradicts that by accepting a bill photo under 5 MB with no PAN field and no ID upload. IRD has reconciled neither. Separately, the published FAQs of Everest Bank and Global IME both state that a winner must apply within five days, against the procedure's पन्ध्र, fifteen. Trust the कार्यविधि, and do not let a bank's help page cost you a prize. The 25% deduction under Section 88A is unchanged, which is why Rs 1,33,334 lands as Rs 1,00,000.50.

What two draws have produced

The cash column moved about fiftyfold in one fortnight, which is the only participation number in this scheme that has genuinely changed behaviour. The QR column grew 25%, and some of that is simply more banks switching on mid-Shrawan rather than anyone buying differently.

The winners are ordinary in a way the scheme's designers presumably wanted. The first bumper, coupon 007315254493, went to Hemraj Joshi on a Rs 250 electric bulb from a general store in Punarbas, Kanchanpur. The second, coupon 026888979039, went to Tul Pudasaini, a police sub-inspector posted in Hetauda, on Rs 350 for a phone cover and screen. Payout has been slower than the announcements: as of 17 August only two of the first sixteen winners had actually been handed money.

Whether any of it is working on revenue is a separate question, and the early answer is no. Shrawan 2083 revenue came to Rs 92.23 arba, 5.84% of the Rs 1,580.32 arba annual target, against 5.71% in Shrawan 2082. Tax revenue grew 5.60% year on year and its share of target slipped from 6.09% to 6.07%. The three prior years' Shrawan collections ran at 5.76%, 5.54% and 6.68%, so 5.84% is unremarkable. Hitting the target needs about 27% growth. One district bucks it: IRD Simara registered 915 new PANs and VAT registrations in Shrawan 2083 against 307 a year earlier.

What is still unclear

• The 10% VAT refund on digital payments may not exist. This is a correction worth making loudly, because the claim is everywhere including my own earlier post. A search of the FY 2083/84 budget speech and the Economic Bill 2083 turns up no enabling provision, and Bizmandu reports that the 10% refund on electronic payments introduced in 2077 अहिलेसम्म कार्यान्वयन हुन सकेको छैन, has not been implemented to date. Do not budget around it.
• Whether one coupon competes for one day or the whole fortnight. Officially unanswered, and IRD says the Ministry ran the draw.
• Whether MCC filtering actually happens. The field exists. The practice is undocumented and the excluded-category list is unpublished.
• What the switches must send, and when. No published field list, cadence or API contract exists anywhere.
• Privacy. IRD holds your PAN, name and mobile against every automatic coupon. There is no privacy notice on the portal and neither circular addresses retention.
• Fonepay, NCHL and NepalPay have published nothing, despite being the layer NRB made responsible for the data.

What you actually need to know

• Your coupon is in your bank or wallet app, and which screen depends entirely on who you bank with. eSewa, Global IME and Nabil show the number. Several banks show only a count, and at least one has not built the screen. There is no way to look up a digital coupon on IRD's portal.
• Never re-register a QR bill by hand. A duplicate voids both coupons, and IRD does not care that you were only being careful.
• Ask for the bill anyway. The automatic path can enter you without a coupon you can see, but no original invoice means no claim, and the claim window is 15 days from the announcement, not 5 as two bank FAQs wrongly state.

Found your coupon somewhere I have not listed, or hit a bank whose app shows nothing? Email parjanya57@gmail.com with the app and the screen and I will add it to the table.

This post is part of the Nepal Money Basics guide — the earn-and-reconcile section. If you are choosing between wallets, the eSewa vs Khalti vs IME Pay comparison now has a tax-coupon dimension to it, and the mechanics of the Fonepay QR rail itself explain why the switch, not your bank, is where this data originates.