Gaming Board Chairman Dr. Andre Rollins said yesterday that if Bahamians vote yes in the January 28 gambling referendum, the government should tax web shops far more than hotel-based casinos because they contribute far less to the economy. He also said that there must be an age restriction on those who can gamble and those who cannot. According to Rollins, hotel-based casinos contribute far more to The Bahamas' gross domestic product than web shops. "The primary rationale for this view is the fact that any regularization of this activity will impose additional responsibilities and costs on our nation's government to treat the negative consequences of gaming on our citizenry, responsibilities and costs which do not arise with foreign gamblers and fund the Gaming Board."
Rollins expressed this view during an address to the Toastmasters International club at Luciano's yesterday. Rollins outlined several regulatory and taxation models that would be implemented in regards to web shop gaming should Bahamians vote yes. Prime Minister Perry Christie previously said that research done under the Ingraham administration revealed that web shops can produce as much as $40 million in tax revenue per year. "...Gambling in the domestic sector, unlike the hotel sector, does not contribute to new money entering the Bahamian economy, but rather a redistribution of money that already exists in the Bahamian economy," he said. The Gaming Board, said Rollins, assigns a tax rate of 25 percent for a casino's first $10 million in annual winnings, 20 percent for a casino's first $10 million to $16 million, a 10 percent tax rate for a casino's first $16 million to $20 million; and a five percent tax rate on every dollar of winnings above and beyond $20 million. He added that a casino is also taxed according to the size of its floor space, by as much as $200,000 per year.
Rollins added that there are four "preliminary regulatory considerations I believe are crucial in the preliminary stages of considering the introduction of a national lottery and web shop legalization and regulation". Those include operational models, capacity to regulate, advertising policy and the legal age for players. "The fourth preliminary regulatory consideration must be the age requirements for those who are permitted to both enter web shops and gamble in them," he said. "It must be recognized that in gaming it is a fallacy that everybody wins, and players need to have reached an age where it is reasonable to expect that they have gained the maturity to understand the realities of gambling and the inherent risks and dangers.
There must also be severe penalties put in place that deal harshly with irresponsible parents who leave their children unattended outside of web shops." However, perhaps the most important element would be the elimination of the potential for corruption, said Rollins. "This exercise will eliminate the potential for corruption in the form of attempted extortion of web shop operators by politicians, or law enforcement officials seeking payoffs in exchange for protection," he said. "It will eliminate the potential for these quasi-banking institutions to be used as money laundering operations to conceal intra-national and international criminal activities such as drug trafficking, human trafficking, weapons trafficking and terrorism. "Lastly, it will eliminate the engendering of a culture where our children are taught that laws are selectively observed and applied, where law enforcement and not justice is blind," Rollins pointed out.
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