Probably most long term Western foreigners are probably here on a JFRV
Most people on ARC are foreign brides or migrant workers who have to leave after contract expiry. When eligible foreign brides renounce their citizenship and get Taiwan ID. This way they avoid being discriminated by banks and companies. Those who don’t want to renounce are stuck with APRC.
Just a few people like @fifieldt were able to get Taiwanese citizenship without renouncing. He also can tell you what it takes to change ID number in banks and other places.
Those with APRC are a tiny minority without any political representation.
Guess why they got the covid-19 vouchers at all? Those were scraps that the Taiwanese did not want. If Taiwanese would have claimed all available vouchers there would be none for APRC holders!
APRC holders are also not allowed to be politically active and can’t vote anyway. So there is not much they can do to improve their situation.
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There are really only like 50000 western foreigners iirc. The vast majority of the 500000 foreigners in Taiwan are Southeast Asian.
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Is different from the original plan to change the second digit of ARC numbers to 7/8/9?
I don’t think there’s even that many.
Half of foreign white collar workers are from Asia.
There’s fifteen to twenty thousand Westerners in Taiwan at most, some of whom are of Taiwanese descent.
There are only 30k foreign white collar professionals working in Taiwan according to govt stats.
Tiny numbers.
There is a website where you can see exactly how many foreign nationals from each country are in each part of Taiwan. Don’t remember the link though.
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how about this?
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I remember that in an earlier, article it was mentioned that one of the reasons for changing ARC format to matches citizens’ number format so that foreigners will be able to take advantage of online services. Such bullshit. It takes 5 minutes to rewrite software with a different regex to parse a different number format. If Taiwan software professionals are that incompetent or just plain lazy, nothing is gonna improve.
It’s along the lines of don’t flush toilet paper because our pipes can’t handle it. I don’t know what the root cause of this mentality is. Taiwan is amazing at hardware but they seem to make an extra effort to suck at writing software. Not a single government/ public service or utility has a usable English version of their app will all the features and simplicity of the Chinese version. It’s ridiculous to hear them make claims that they’ll be bilingual by 2030, just by hiring more white skinned English teachers too.
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This is what I thought years ago when I first experienced my ARC number not working with websites. I’m not a computer guru but I assumed it should be a not-too-difficult programming fix.
Completely changing so many people’s numbers seems like overkill. And, like others, I’m not anticipating this change to go smoothly. But I’m no programmer, so what do I know 
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The new ID number won’t work with most computer systems anyway, since they are set up to expect a 1 or 2, and foreigners won’t use those numbers.
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Do we know that the current system only recognizes 1 and 2, or is it that it just doesn’t recognize letters in the second position? I’m assuming it’s the latter, because if it’s the former then the system will need to be reprogrammed anyway and WTF they could have done that in the first place.
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I will update soon. There is one tool that has already been updated:
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I don’t remember whether it was here, on Facebook, or in a Line group I’m in, but I’ve read at least a couple of posts from people who sounded like they knew what they were talking about saying that it’s indeed often the former.
Every system is different, it depends how they coded it. Just like some sites accept foreigner ID numbers with the letters already.
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I did a quick fix. There might still be some issues. I need to check later:
Let me know if you find some issues!
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Thanks. I don’t have any Linux systems set up at the moment so I can’t install the other tool.
This (made up) ID number was tested by the other tool as valid (also valid in mine)
A800000014