Recently, the media more often publish articles evaluating the effectiveness of the activity of the national gambling regulator, the Commission for Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries (CRGL).
No other state regulator of economic activity receives as much attention as the work of CRGL. There is even less information about the activity of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine (AMCU) in the public space, although the AMCU is the de facto "regulator over regulators".
In general, if we delve into the history of effectiveness of national regulators, we can find an interesting fact: the media paid almost no attention to this matter before the legalization of the gambling market in 2020. There are enough materials about effectiveness of the fight against corruption, of the implementation of reforms, of the provision of public services. However, there were hardly any materials relate to determining the effectiveness of the work of a separate state body according to predetermined evaluation criteria.
Therefore, the current case with CRGL can become the basis for the formation of an efficiency evaluation scale. For example, the following parameters can be taken as basic indicators:
– Ratio of funds allocated for the maintenance of the regulator and the amount of revenue received by the budget from the industry regulated by it;
– Level of implementation of the planned budget indicators of operation;
– Degree of implementation of measures to prevent and combat illegal economic activity;
- Level of implementation of measures to prevent corruption, etc.
This way, it will be possible to compare the overall efficiency of the operation of national regulators in different industries later. If we consider the work of CRGL from the perspective of these criteria, we will get the following indicators:
- The state allocated UAH 86.8 million for its operation in 2023, and as of less than 5 months of this year, CRGL earned more than UAH 600 million for the state (in license payments), i.e., CRGL brought the state 7 times more revenue than the state spent on the work of the Commission;
- CRGL is ranked 6th among central executive bodies in the rating of implementation of measures to prevent corruption.
- In 2022, the Commission fulfilled 98% of the target revenue to the state budget. Moreover, it was the target formed before the war;
- Over the entire period of activity, CRGL has identified 1,895 illegal gambling web resources. As of April 2023, it was established that only 727 websites from the entire selection previously identified currently organize and conduct gambling, while the others changed their purpose or made access to gambling games impossible. That is, in three years of combating illegal gambling, it was possible to reduce the number of illegal sites by 2/3.
Obviously, these are far from all efficiency criteria that can become a basis for comparison, but they can be used to start its formation and institutionalization. And it is CRGL that will be an example of efficiency for other regulators, the activity of which will be evaluated later.