.svg)
Body
Data from the country’s Ministry of Finance shows Poland’s fight against illegal slots is inefficient and has done little to curtail the country’s sizable gaming machine black market.
The finance ministry’s document says that, last year, a total of 2,300 entities were fined for illegally operating slots.
Of these, 1,325 had already been fined previously for such activities, but were apparently not discouraged by the applicable fine of up to PLN100,000 (€21,000) per slot. Likely because, of the PLN462.1m in fines imposed in 2021, only slightly more than PLN1m, or a mere 0.22 percent, was collected.
The document was signed by Mariusz Gojny, the deputy finance minister and deputy chair of the National Tax Administration (KAS), and released on the request of two opposition lawmakers from the Civic Coalition (KO) parliamentary club, Izabela Leszczyna and Janusz Cichoń.
Poland’s amended gambling law that entered into force in 2017 designated the state-run lottery operator Totalizator Sportowy as the only entity allowed to run slots outside casinos.
Of the 2,300 illegal operators, 158 fined entities have already been fined twice since the law’s entry into force and 377 companies have received more than two fines for such violations, according to the ministry.
“The state is not able to handle illegal gambling. The KAS confiscates illegal slots, issues millions of zloty in fines, but their collection is going poorly,” Cichoń, who served as the country’s first deputy finance minister from 2013 to 2015, told local business daily Rzeczpospolita.
The document indicates that, last year, the fined entities appealed 618 times against enforcement action.
In 25 cases, the appeals were recognised and in 249 the procedure to impose a fine was cancelled.
Reasons for cancellation included the fined company’s removal from the National Court Register, imposition of a fine on a company’s former management board member who was no longer serving on its board at that time and formal errors in the procedure to issue the penalty, according to the finance ministry.
“This means that the same companies keep being fined. They don’t pay [the imposed fines] and they continue to run illegal gambling without any consequences,” according to Cichoń.
The disappointing figures on the payments collected from illegal slot operators are in sharp contrast with the ministry’s optimistic data on the major drop in the value of the country’s illegal online gambling segment in the years 2016 to 2021.
In his written contribution to a report released by the Polish branch of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), Gojny wrote that the “activities of the National Tax Administration in the field of combating illegal gambling, combined with regulatory activities directed at the gambling market, are bringing results” as when “comparing 2021 with 2016, the share of 'black' online gambling fell more than fourfold, from 79.7 percent to 17.9 percent”.
The official said the drop in the illegal online gambling sector’s share of the Polish market was accompanied by an increase in the state budget’s revenues from the gambling tax.
Last year, Poland obtained about PLN3.05bn from the levy, which was up 60.3 percent compared with 2018, according to Gojny.
