Ukraine managed to turn its gambling business into a large and efficient taxpayer.

In just the first five months of this year, companies operating online gaming businesses paid four times more taxes than in 2022, the Bureau of Economic Security (BES) reported.

As of June 1, these companies have paid more than UAH 2.2B, while for the whole of 2022 this amount did not exceed UAH 550M. These results were achieved due to the cooperation between the BES, the SBU, the Prosecutor’s Office, and the National Bank of Ukraine in the detection of tax evasion schemes. The most common scenario is miscoding, when the payment code that belongs to gambling transactions is not indicated, but an adjacent one, on which taxes are much lower.

As a result, online casinos paid only UAH 34.5M in taxes for 2021. In 2022, after the investigation, the amount increased to UAH 549.7M. The miscoding scheme was organized by officials of several banks, where one of the main banks processed approximately UAH 20B. The amount of unpaid taxes exceeds UAH 1.3B.