We've made the Israelis happy.
Every week, hundreds of tourists from Israel spend their weekends in Bucharest, practicing gambling tourism. The travel packages comprise visits to the casinos of luxury hotels in Bucharest.
They will do so even more after the new legislative draft for the National Office for Gambling gets approved, which stipulates that individuals will be exempted from paying taxes on winnings from slot machines, videolottery, fixed-odds betting, casinos, poker clubs and on-line gambling.
The government wants to take this measure because it claims there are no ways to find out how much a gambler earned. In other words, the Government says that there are no methods to monitor those who earn money from the aforementioned games.
Sources from the market explain the situation as follows: "You go into the casino and you make money at blackjack; you move to the roulette table and you lose; you make it back on craps, but you lose it on the slot machine. How to determine the taxable income? How do you collect the taxes in online gambling? The manager of the game is registered in an island somewhere and has servers in the cloud, but processes billion Euros from all over the world. Do you bust down the doors of the players? Do you violate banking secrecy and that of card operations?".
Considering the imagination it demonstrated recently in coming up with the tax on electricity poles, in this particular case, the authorities could have forced the operators in the industry to resort to withholding at the source, by which they would be the ones to withhold the taxes and then transfer them to the state budget. The accounting department that gambling operators should have should know how to do that.
This practice already exists in other sectors, where some taxes are withheld at the source.
Market representatives say that t