Items confiscated from delinquent taxpayers – from brand-name lingerie to a model locomotive – are turning into a gold mine for cash-strapped local governments, who are auctioning them on the Internet.
In fiscal 2007, final auction prices for such items totalled nearly 4.68 billion yen (S$60 million), according to Yahoo Japan, which runs a special auction site for seized items and other government assets, the Asahi Shimbun reported.
That tidy sum is 100 times more than what similar auctions fetched in fiscal year 2004, when Yahoo Japan started the service.
The Osaka prefectural government, faced with debts amounting to 5 trillion yen, recently earned 2.6 million yen by selling 5,149 lingerie items made by a well-known domestic manufacturer, the newspaper reported on Tuesday.
The Osaka government seized a total of 5,700 items from an undergarment wholesaler after the latter failed to make tax payments in 2005.
The items were sold by the end of March this year in three online auctions and a bargain sale.
Initially, male prefectural officials were sceptical about the idea of holding an online auction, but a female official assured them the idea would work, saying the undergarments were items that she herself would buy, the newspaper said…
— Read the rest of the article over at The Straits Time