The supervisory remit of Latvia’s lotteries has changed hands, with the State Revenue Service now in charge of regulations.
A change mandated by the Ministry of Finance, the State Revenue Service will no longer only be responsible for gambling taxation, but will also assimilate gambling regulatory duties of the previously standalone Inspectorate for Supervision of Gambling and Lotteries (ISGL) – with the latter now integrated in the former.
Officials have commented that this would streamline the supervision of the domestic sector, as the previous structure saw the ISGL and the State Revenue Service enforcing two separate mechanisms to essentially regulate the same sector.
For that purpose, the ISGL’s integration into the State Revenue Service will see the latter create two new internal departments to handle the extra workload on top of the taxation duties.
One of them will take on the licensing and compliance monitoring of Latvia’s sector, while the other will ensure that remote and on-site inspections are undertaken and that financial and technical compliance is in place.
Ministry officials concluded that the introduced changes are essential to optimise the regulatory functions of the government, and that they will lead to improved coordination and minimum bureaucracy in a time when online gambling is becoming a more prevalent vertical in Latvia.