The article that aimed to increase the tax burden on the sector was removed. The industry insisted that the government miscalculated the companies' revenues.
Colombia.- The Article No. 13 of the Financing Law currently under discussion in Colombia was removed from the project. This article was the one that stipulated the increase of the VAT levy on gambling and betting, therefore, now, the sector will no longer be included in the reform that seeks to increase Colombian state revenue.
It was thanks to a proposition from representative César Cristian Gómez that the parliamentarians agreed to remove the gambling and betting sector from the reform, thus giving reason to the organizations that encompass various industry players, who worked to prevent this in order to avoid a tax increase leading to the growth of illegal gambling.
Regarding the decision to eliminate the initiative, it was even alleged that there was lobbying within Congress perpetrated by the companies in the sector. The former Minister of Finance, Ricardo Bonilla, had even said that there were pressures from the sector during the discussion of the tax project, which was dismissed by the companies.
However, the guild that groups a large part of the betting companies assured that the real figures of the sector are not taken into account and therefore an unviable project had been developed.
Evert Montero, president of Fecoljuegos, assured that it is very important for the sector that the risk posed by the article's proposal was recognized. "We attended Congress on several occasions to talk. We also spoke with some government bodies, to whom we tried to explain that the collection was being made based on the value of the bets made and does not correspond to real money," he said.
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The government, according to Fecoljuegos, was talking about bets up to COP 35.6bn (USD 8.1m) for 2023, which does not reflect real resources. Montero assured that, based on figures from Coljuegos, the real money from the operators was COP 2.1bn (USD 480,000), which was what the government was intending to collect through VAT in the tax reform. In this way, the reform would have absorbed 100 percent of the resources.
"The financial and mathematical model of the activity is not known and this does not mean that we do not pay taxes, but that we pay others that are direct: 15 percent on what is generated. We are paying large VAT taxes because we are large consumers of advertising and technology," said Montero.
