Tax committee chief calls for urgent reforms to gambling oversight in Ukraine
Danylo Hetmantsev wants an open competition to select the next head of the Ukrainian gambling regulator and hasn’t ruled out tax change.
Ukraine.- Legislator Danylo Hetmantsev, chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s Committee on Finance, Tax and Customs Policy, has called for urgent reforms to gambling oversight in the country. He says there needs to be an open competition to appoint a new head of the gambling regulator, PlayCity, with representatives from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) involved in the process.
Speaking to the news agency Interfax-Ukraine, the MP, who is a member of the Verkhovna Rada for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party, argued that the full implementation of the new state online monitoring system for gambling (DSOM) should be among the first priorities if the regulator’s leadership changes. He said that improvements to the taxation of gambling winnings would not be possible until the system is fully operational since authorities currently lack access to reliable data on payouts.
“DSOM must be launched, and then I do not rule out that the question of changing the formula for taxing winnings will be appropriate,” Hetmantsev said.
Hetmantsev also argued that a fresh competition for the lottery market should replace the previous one.
PlayCity announced last month that DSOM was now live on a test basis, with the first 11 gambling operators already connected and others are in the process of connecting. The DSOM is intended to allow monitoring of the whole Ukrainian gambling sector, giving PlayCity visibility of all gambling transactions made on the regulated market.
It contains two main parts: internal, accessible to state authorities, and external, accessible to gambling operators. Access to the system for all parties is carried out exclusively through using a unique identifier.
Last month, PlayCity was put under the coordination of the Prime Minister, ending more than a year of oversight by the Minister of Digital Transformation. The regulator has suggested establishing a separate procedure for selecting its future head.
