An unjustified criticism of the legal gambling market has been the topic of most of my recent blogs. There are various reasons for criticism. However, the theses of market opponents have one thing in common: they are false. You begin to clearly understand their manipulative nature the moment you look at the actual numbers and facts. The current situation with budget revenues from legal gambling clearly demonstrates this.
In the last few months, the number of provocative statements towards the legal gambling market, and in particular Commission for Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries, has been constantly increasing. At the same time, the industry's real contribution to the country's economy is completely ignored. Similarly, critics do not mention the voluntary financial support of legal gambling organizers of the army and the population from the very beginning of Russia's war against Ukraine.
However, commenting on these manipulations and entering into empty arguments that have no meaning is against my principles. I believe that facts and statistics are the best answer to provocations and misinformation.
Now let's look at the facts in terms of one of the key topics for criticism, namely state budget revenues from gambling. Thanks to the fruitful work of the team, the Commission for Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries paid more than UAH 522 million to the state budget in Q1 of 2023. This is 62% more than the planned amount of UAH 322 million. In total, according to the plan for 2023, the state budget should receive UAH 1.596 billion of revenues from gambling license fees. That is, 34.5% of this amount has been already received in the first 3 months of the year. I want to note that those are exclusively license fees, without taking into account hundreds of millions of hryvnias of taxes that legal organizers have already paid this year.
If this trend continues, we can predict that legal gambling will be able to exceed the indicators included in the budget, at the end of the year. In the event that the tax draft Law 2713-д is finally adopted and the unified State Online Monitoring System (SOMS) is implemented, the probability of the realization of such a forecast increases dramatically.
So, what inefficiency of the Commission and "underpayment" of money to the budget by the legal organizers of gambling games are we talking about? You don't need to be an expert to understand that the reform is beneficial.
While others work with "words", the legal gambling business continues to work with "actions", and the quantitative indicators of budget revenues indicate this very clearly. Therefore, criticism of the Commission and the market as a whole is unjustified. In addition to that, if you look pragmatically, it is economically unprofitable for the state. What is the point of criticizing and destroying the industry, which has been meeting indicators of revenues to the state budget since the first year of its existence, and in some cases exceeds those indicators? I really hope that manipulations around legal gambling will stop in the near future and we will work on developing an industry that can provide the state with billions of revenue per year.
Glory to Ukraine!
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