The Romanian gambling regulator, the National Office for Gambling (ONJN), has revealed huge discrepancies in tax payments by some unintended gambling operators.
A statement signed off by ONJN President, Vlad-Cristian Soare, revealed that an investigation into ‘serious indications’ of tax discrepancies has been underway for a month.
Soare’s statement comes just over a year after the ONJN received criticism from the Court of Accounts (CCR), the authority responsible for public funds management, regarding its oversight of operator taxation.
The CCR accused the ONJN of mismanagement of Romania’s gambling sector by failing to spot tax liabilities of between RON 3.3bn-4.3bn (£568-£668m). The ONJN believes it has now found out exactly how these discrepancies occurred.
Soare’s mission
The ONJN believes it has found evidence of manipulation of gross gaming revenues (GGR) among certain Romanian operators – again, it has not mentioned exactly which operators this is.
However, for one of the biggest gambling markets in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and one that remains a key target for M&A and new launches, this is a particularly big deal.
The ONJN has become particularly suspicious of accounts where winnings were unjustifiably large, repetitive in a short period of time and identical in what Soare calls ‘abnormally accurate amounts’.
“The pattern is obvious: numerous wins, concentrated on the same day or the same month, in almost identical amounts and of very high values, which raises serious suspicions regarding the way in which the GGR is reported and calculated,” Soare said.
Examples cited by the ONJN include a player with 84 winnings totalling RON 10m in ‘a very short period of time’, a player with 60 wins in a month with RON 7m, and another with 33 wins in worth RON 4.8m with 31 in a single day.
These winnings led to discrepancies between the tax reported by operators and what they actually paid, to the tune of tens of millions of lei, particularly in 2024.
The ONJN has cited two different cases, one of an unmanned ‘remote gambling operator’ with a difference of RON 5m and another of a ‘slot-machine gambling operator’ with a difference of around RON 18m.
Soare took charge of the ONJN in April 2025, three months after the CCR made its scathing public criticism of the regulator. According to Sorare’s latest statement, sorting out the tax situation was a top priority for him from day one.
“Today I can inform you that the aspects reported then have been confirmed,” he said.
“I mention that, since the moment of taking office, I have started numerous control actions. However, due to some deficiencies discovered, I changed the former management of the Control Directorate and the Monitoring Directorate.”
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