Buried in Article 192 of the gambling bill now sitting in the Dominican Senate is a line that most operators in the country have been waiting years to read. If it survives, betting shops, sports betting operators and lottery agencies would be able to clear tax and fee obligations built up through December 2025 for less than they actually owe.
The bill does not use the word forgiveness. It does not use condonation either. What it creates is a “special discount regime,” administered by the Gaming Council alongside the Ministry of Finance and Economy and the Directorate General of Internal Taxes, with the Directorate General of Gambling handling implementation. Late payment surcharges are excluded. The discount percentages themselves are not written into Article 192. They point instead at Law 30-26, the tax package President Luis Abinader signed on June 18.
There is one condition, and it is the whole point of the clause. To qualify, an operator has to have regularized and registered its business first.
That is the trade. The Dominican state has spent 2026 trying to pull an enormous informal sector onto the books, and Article 192 is the carrot. More than 71,000 lottery and sports betting bancas are registered across the country, a figure cited when the Senate took up the gambling regulation bill on first reading on June 25. The real number of outlets operating in some form has long been assumed to be higher.
The Chamber of Deputies approved the bill with modifications, which sends it back to the Senate for a final look before anything takes effect.
How the tax rates landed
The debt clause did not appear in a vacuum. It follows a fight over rates that the industry mostly won.
The Executive submitted the Anti-Crisis Plan in early June, formally a bill on pro-growth measures, tax simplification and mitigation of the international crisis, aiming to raise between DOP 40 billion and DOP 50 billion, roughly 680 million to 850 million US dollars. The original text applied a flat 25 percent tax to all lottery, banca and sports betting winnings, with no floor.
Senator Pedro Catrain, sitting on the bicameral commission reviewing the plan, pushed back and got the structure rewritten. The version the Senate passed on June 17 in two consecutive readings applies 25 percent only to prizes above DOP 600,000, about 10,200 dollars. Winnings between DOP 200,000 and DOP 600,000 are taxed at 15 percent. Anything under DOP 200,000, roughly 3,400 dollars, is exempt.
Catrain also went after the annual flat fee on betting shops. The Executive wanted DOP 120,000 per establishment. The Senate cut it to DOP 85,000, a saving of about 600 dollars per outlet per year. Across 71,000 registered bancas, that difference alone is worth more than DOP 2.4 billion annually if every outlet were paying.
The whole package moved fast. Abinader promulgated it as Law 30-26 six days after it was submitted, a speed that drew criticism in Santo Domingo. Senator Antonio Taveras called the reform light and short on structural depth. Senator Omar Fernández objected that public spending kept rising while the burden shifted to citizens.
Two bills, one sector, and a fight over who runs it
Rates and arrears are the visible part. The bigger question is who ends up regulating the industry once all of this clears Congress.
Right now supervision sits mainly with the Directorate of Casinos and Games of Chance, an arm of the Ministry of Finance and Economy. The gambling bill would build new machinery around it, including a Gaming Council and a monitoring body.
Senator Pedro Tineo has introduced a separate proposal that would go further. It would turn the National Lottery into a decentralized state entity with its own financial and administrative autonomy, and hand it primary authority over bancas, sports betting shops, casinos and electronic games. That would take a body currently in the business of running lottery products and make it the referee for everyone else, casino operators included.
Teófilo “Quico” Tabar, who is coordinating the regularization process, has been signaling for weeks that the cleanup will not be gentle. In late July he said he would propose a full review of every activity and license in the sector that has operated outside the limits set by existing rules, and asked that status changes in gambling licenses be frozen until the new law is settled.
Read alongside Article 192, that reads less like a threat and more like a deadline. Regularize now and the state discounts what you owe. Wait, and you are reviewed under a law written by people who already know your outlet exists.
What is still open
Three things are not settled. The Senate has not given the gambling bill final approval, and it can strip or rewrite Article 192 as easily as the deputies added it. The actual discount percentages have not been published in a form operators can model. And Tineo’s National Lottery restructuring is a separate track entirely, which means the regulator an operator registers with this year may not be the regulator supervising it in 2028.
For anyone holding Dominican tax arrears, the calculation is still guesswork on the numbers and clear on the direction. The window is being opened deliberately, and Tabar has been explicit that it will not stay open for people who sit it out.