IPLyC must explain the 2% fee for online gambling
Seven online gaming companies operate in the province of Buenos Aires and are now required to withhold 2% on the prizes they pay out. The same withholding, however, was halted for land-based venues. This asymmetry is what ignited the parliamentary offensive against the Provincial Institute of Lottery and Casinos (IPLyC).
The new scheme was established by Resolution 1149/2026, issued under the leadership of Gonzalo Atanasof, and sets a fee equivalent to 2% on prizes received by players in authorized online gambling games.
In the Buenos Aires Senate, the Unión y Libertad bloc, led by Sergio Vargas, submitted a request for information with three demands: that the institute promptly provide, in writing, the resolution that halted the withholding in land-based venues; that it clarify how the declarative regime, to which licensees are subject, operates; and that it explain the full scope of the digital tax.
The opposition's argument targets the regulator's own capacity. Vargas, along with Carlos Kikuchi and Silvana Ventura, argues that the institute is not technically capable of collecting anything from the platforms when it has just conceded defeat on the same issue in land-based casinos. For the senators, treating two equivalent activities differently opens a constitutional vulnerability, distorts competition between channels, and, above all, prevents money that belongs to the province from being collected. They added an inconvenient fact: land-based venues have been operating for years with their machines connected to centralized data networks, so the technical excuse for stopping the instant discount there demands a detailed response to the Legislature.
The request comes with attached documents. The legislators want to see the software homologation certificates for each platform and documentary proof that the system can calculate and deduct the tax instantly at the moment of payment, play by play. They also ask why control was tied to declarations that the licensees themselves draft weekly, instead of a live digital audit connected via mirror services.
The second line of fire came from the Chamber of Deputies. Valentín Miranda, from Radicalism, presented a bill for Axel Kicillof's administration to report how much it expects to collect from the online slots tax and what that money will be used for. His argument is that, so far, it has not been specified which programs will receive the funds, which organizations will execute them, with what objectives, or within what timeframes.
The IPLyC regulates and operates gambling in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina's largest volume betting jurisdiction, and manages both land-based casinos and bingos, as well as the online market enabled a few years ago for a limited group of licensees. The claim comes days after the province itself decided to halt the application of the same tax on the physical circuit.
Tags: Provincial Institute of Lottery and Casinos, Resolution 1149/2026, Online gaming tax, Buenos Aires Legislature