Culture and sports should not miss out on funding because of a drafting error left in last year’s gambling tax amendments, Prime Minister Kristen Michal (Reform) said Tuesday.
The error, made in the bill of amendments to the Gambling Tax Act passed in December, eliminated online casino taxation for 2026, which could create a one and a half month budget gap for the Cultural Endowment of Estonia. Michal said the government will need to find the missing funds elsewhere.
“My position is that culture and sports should not go without funding because of this,” Michal said. “If needed, we will look at other priorities and adjust our activities. If need be, we’ll do some things more sparingly, but culture and sports shouldn’t suffer because of this.”
Michal called the mistake human error and stressed the need to fix it quickly. He said he expects it to be fixed between January and February, noting that it should be resolved within a month to a month and a half, depending on how quickly the necessary parliamentary procedures could move.
Lawmakers in the Riigikogu, Michal said, will now have to decide whether it’s faster to submit a new bill or attach the amendment to an existing bill. Either approach will require temporarily halting the bill so all relevant parties can submit their corrections.
Online slot machines being played on a phone. Source: Niek Doup/Unsplash
“So the timing is roughly the same,” he said. “I think about a month may be needed here to fix this, but maybe it can be done faster.”
The prime minister also criticized the opposition’s broad attack on the mix-up, noting the bill in question had been thoroughly discussed in the Riigikogu before being passed yet the error went unnoticed.
“Officials apologized today, and I think we have to accept that,” Michal said. “People make mistakes. We will revise [the bill], and parliament can fix it.”
He added that the error was quickly spotted by market participants at the start of the new year.
“I would have hoped that nowadays we could make laws without these kinds of mistakes, but apparently, we can’t,” Michal said.
MP: This was never the intent
Tanel Tein Source: Ken Mürk/ERR
In a written statement on Tuesday, Eesti 200 MP Tanel Tein, a leading lawmaker on the gambling tax amendments and a member of the Riigikogu’s Finance Committee, emphasized that at no point was the intention of the changes to end the taxing of online casinos.
According to Tein, the goal was to gradually lower the gambling tax on remote games, including both skill and chance games, from 6 to 4 percent, but a Ministry of Finance comment last fall added the term “skill games” to the bill, narrowing the legislation’s scope.
While one version of the bill was corrected to remove the wording, another version that reintroduced it was the one that ended up passed by the Riigikogu in December.
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