Romania considers limits on gambling spend
The proposal comes amid concerns about the failings of the national gambling regulator.
Romania.- While ministers await answers on the failings identified in a damning audit of the Romanian gambling regulator, Save Romania Union (USR) has proposed a new measure that would limit player spending. The proposal would prohibit customers from gambling more than 10 per cent of their monthly income.
The limit would apply to both online and retail gambling. For it to work, licensees would need to report customer spending data in real time. Data would be sent to the tax agency ANAF for retail gambling and to the National Bank for online gambling spending.
The USR suggests that urgent measures are needed to impose “new accountability” on the governance of gambling in the county. Its bill calls for gambling operators to be supervised by the National Bank and the national tax agency ANAF instead of the ONJN alone due to the critical audit of the regulator.
Diana Stoica, a USR deputy, has summoned the leadership of the ONJN to parliament to provide answers after the Court of Accounts (CCR) called for a criminal investigation in its audit of the ONJN.
Serious irregularities were found in the regulator’s auditing of gambling licences, including supervision of authorisation fees and gambling tax, which included a failure to detect potential discrepancies in return-to-player (RTP) levels that may have caused the state to lose between 3.3 and 4.3bn lei (€630m to €900m) in gambling tax revenues.
The audit found that the regulator had never verified financial data submitted by gambling companies, failed to verify gambling licence fees and had not issued penalties when required.
“1 million active gamblers exceed their income”
Regulatory failings aside, the USR also claimed that authorities have failed to acknowledge the financial risks of gambling, suggesting that “one million active gamblers exceed their income”.
It proposes the creation of a simplified self-exclusion scheme to replace the ONJN’s current system. This would require customer registration for all gambling offerings in order to allow the processing of real-time self-exclusion requests. The USR is also calling for a review of any past self-exclusion failures, including the issue of refunds to any players who were allowed to gamble after requesting exclusion.
USR deputy Adrian Giurgiu said: “The ONJN is either incapable or complicit in gambling harm. The solution is to limit how much addicts can gamble. In Romania, gambling expenditures surpass the budgets of key ministries, making the fight unequal. With nearly one million active players, many risk becoming the next tragedy.”
