What is happening in the gambling market? There are several rumors that the Minister of Economy and Finance is thinking of slightly reforming this sector.
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For those who don't know, Italy is one of the countries that produces the highest turnover in terms of spending on online gambling; a change could completely overturn these statistics, as well as the entire perception about the world of online casinos and sports betting sites.
With the current government crisis we do not know if this will still be one of the priorities of the Italian government, but let's discover all the possible scenarios.
The key points proposed by the Minister on this possible revision
The gambling market, including that of casino online, could suffer a slight jolt. This is what we can in fact learn from the latest rumors reaching us from the Government Palace.
Daniele Franco, Minister of Economy and Finance, would have proposed, in February 2022, an initial document to the Chamber, with attention paid to the world of online gambling.
There are 3 key points on which the Minister wanted to focus attention:
- Minimize cases of problem gamblers
- Trying to put an end to illegal and black market activities
- Optimize tax revenues of authorized companies
This initial plan also mentioned reducing betting and winning limits, although (still today) we know nothing about the figures or to which markets these would apply.
Another very interesting point is that Franco would have proposed to impose a central register of all players, in order to be able to integrate the National Self-Exclusion program in a more central and effective way.
Tax on turnover from sports betting is also likely to increase
Another novelty, this time more concrete, that could interest the gambling market in Italy consists in the increase of the tax on the turnover deriving from sports betting.
In 2020, in order to provide assistance to sports during the health emergency, the Government introduced a 0.5% tax on sports betting turnover.
More recently, the Undersecretary for Sport, Valentina Vezzali, would have started to push for a definitive increase in this tax, wanting to raise it to 1% forever.
The proposal seems to have raised the ears of several economists in the government, since Vezzali managed to secure a meeting to examine her proposal with representatives of the Italian Treasury, the Customs and Monopolies Agency, better known as ADM, which regulates gambling, the Ministries of Economic Development, Labor Policy, the Finance Commission and the Revenue Agency.
According to some estimates, a definitive increase of this tax to 1% would guarantee an income of approximately 160 million Euros, to be added to the additional 500 million deriving from taxes on retail sales (18%) and online sales (22%).
In 2020, when this temporary 0.5% tax was introduced, the state managed to collect a whopping 90 million euros.
What would change for bettors?
In short: little or nothing. As we have seen, one of these proposals would directly “hit” only the Italian gambling market, and not the bettors, while Franco's proposal would somehow limit the amount of money and winnings that bettors could bet and obtain.
However, according to the Online Gambling Operators in Italy, fired by the Customs and Monopolies Agency, the increase of the final tax to 1% on the turnover from sports betting would lead to a drop in revenues of 10 to 20%. Consequently, to remedy this, bookmakers will have to offer less favorable odds and prices for bettors, thus involuntarily pushing them to prefer illegal and black market sites, rather than officially regulated ones.
Article published on 19 July 2022 - 14:36
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