Privatization of gaming industry pushed

A LAWMAKER has urged the government to consider the country’s gaming sector as an untapped “goldmine” that can generate up to P300 billion in tax revenues yearly, saying it must not “dilly- dally on the plan to privatize” the industry.

At a recent hearing on the Department of Finance’s ( DoF) 2020 budget, Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon urged Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez to expedite that plan.

Once the industry is privatized, the senator told the Finance chief, it could yield around P300 billion in additional revenues “with no effort.”

Drilon also said revenues that the government could generate from this move “would be a lot higher than the taxes it expects to raise from the new round of sin [ taxes] on alcohol and e- cigarettes amounting P37 billion on year one.”

“I think [ that] if you privatize the gaming industry, you will realize 10 times more than what you can get from the sin taxes on alcohol and e- cigarettes,” he said.

“It is a rich source of revenue, which I strongly feel is not being tapped properly. Do not let go of the low- hanging fruit that can generate huge revenues,” the legislator added.

According to Drilon, the law he authored, the Government- owned and - Controlled Corporation Governance Act, allows the President to amend the charter of state- owned companies, including industry regulators Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. ( Pagcor) and Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office ( PCSO), without going to Congress.

For his part, Dominguez said: “As soon as I joined [ the government], that was the area we looked at immediately as a source of funds and as a way of correcting a situation that we call anomalous, where you are regulating yourself.”

“I am not saying that Pagcor will lose money. They will just be a regulating and a collecting agency,” he added.

By privatizing the industry, Drilon said loopholes and corruption could be prevented, citing corruption issues in the PCSO.

“If you look at the operating expense of Pagcor and the PCSO, there are a lot of items there where you wonder where it is going,” he said.

“With this privatization, you will be able to check on many of the income leakages all over the place. This is something that can put order and correct a lot of things that had gone wrong because of the current setup,” he said.

Drilon and Dominguez agreed that Pagcor should not act as both regulator and operator, with the senator seeing a possible “conflict of interest,” while the secretary describing the situation as “anomalous.”