~TEATT confirms no additional income from two years of reform work; new license fees, penalties and Authority funding cannot be quantified until Parliament passes legislation.~
PHILIPSBURG:--- After about two years of work to overhaul Sint Maarten's gambling sector, Government has acknowledged that the reforms have generated no additional revenue for the country's coffers so far.
The admission appears in TEATT's responses to questions on the 2026 National Budget.
The Government says work undertaken over the past 24 months included reviewing existing gambling legislation, drafting a new Kansspelverordening, developing a modern licensing and supervisory framework, designing revised license and regulatory fees, and conducting financial and institutional analysis for the proposed St Maarten Gambling Authority.
Despite that work, the Ministry states unequivocally that no additional Government revenue has yet been realized because the legislation has not been enacted and the new regulatory framework has not entered into force.
No additional revenue attributable to the reform has therefore been reflected in the 2026 Budget.
The documents also reveal that Government cannot yet provide an official projection of what the reforms will eventually earn.
The draft legislation is expected to establish the framework for licensing, supervision, compliance, regulatory funding and Government revenue, but until Parliament approves it, TEATT says it cannot confirm the final license fees, penalties, compliance measures, funding model for the Gambling Authority or associated revenue estimates.
The Authority's annual operating cost also remains unknown until the legislative process and organizational structure are complete.
The Ministry says stronger regulation should eventually improve collection of statutory fees and other Government revenues. But the 2026 Budget does not separately identify or quantify any revenue expected from the gambling reforms.
For Parliament, that creates a straightforward accountability issue.
Government has spent two years developing a new system designed partly to strengthen gambling-related revenues, yet as of the draft budget response the financial return is zero, and neither the future revenue nor the annual cost of the new regulator can be quantified.
That does not establish that the reform has failed. The documents show that the legal framework is unfinished.
But it does mean Parliament should insist on seeing a financial model before the new system becomes operational: expected licence revenue, regulatory fees, collection of arrears, enforcement costs, staffing expenses and the amount required annually to sustain the Gambling Authority.
