Sweden's Tax Agency Finds Players With Undeclared Poker Winnings

In Sweden, poker players are not taxed on winnings from sites licensed inside the European Economic Area, but those players gambling at poker rooms not part of the EU are required to declare their winnings and pay regular taxes on them. Since 2012, Sweden’s tax authority Skatteverket has been cracking down on poker players who don’t declare their winnings, but recent cooperation between Swedish authorities and a number of tax havens have now helped identify around 50 players who have failed to declare nearly SEK250 million (€27.5 million) in undeclared poker winnings.
Apparently, Sweden’s tax agency had presented a list of screen names to various offshore tax havens in order to help identify the real names behind the online poker accounts, and many of the people subsequently identified have turned out to be professional players.
“We are talking about people who are well established in society, many of them are professional gamblers,” explained Skatteverket’s Dag Hardyson.
Commenting on the tax authority’s latest investigations, Hardyson then added:
“I am pretty certain that this is the first time that we have used the possibility of trying to get information about not yet identified people. And we have been getting excellent information from tax havens. This really has paid off.”
As part of its investigation, Skatteverket staff apparently ploughed their way through poker forums and online poker databases looking for potential players flaunting Sweden’s tax laws, and those players subsequently found will “now be asked to pay taxes and fines for millions of Swedish Kronor,” according to Unibet Poker ambassador Dan Glimme.
It would therefore seem that the safest option for Swedish poker players is to only play at those sites licensed in Sweden and the EU, or else risk getting into trouble with the law some time later down the line. Nevertheless, the size of Sweden’s poker environment is limited as the country operates a ring fenced monopoly controlled under the watchful eye of Svenska Spel.