A workshop organized by the MoF on the Technical Specifications of the Register of Excluded Persons (REP) took place on Wednesday in the General Directorate of Customs. Primarily, we learned that the complete technical specification will be published on the website of the MoF and on its official notice board next week, allegedly on 17 or 18 December.
According to the estimates of director Mr. Šabo, this REP will cover about 150 to 200,000 persons (a significant overlap of the first and second groups of persons is expected, see below). The MoF expects an overall decline in the gambling market, or rather in the gambling tax revenue, about 15%.
REP will cover the following persons:
- persons receiving material need benefits and jointly assessed persons,
- persons in bankruptcy,
- persons who have been subject to sanctions/protective treatment by prohibiting participation in games and betting
The obligation to join the REP will be imposed on gambling operators within one year of the above publication of the technical specification, i.e. the Register will be fully effective in December 2020.
According to estimates, the testing environment should be launched at the end of February 2020 and the live version of the system in June, to which people will actually be able to connect. Of course, the current SDSL system will also be fully operational at all times. In this respect, the MoF strongly recommended that all operators use the option of mass registrations of current gambling participants in the system (already registered gambling participants with individual operators) within packages with a maximum number of 100,000 persons per day; to be specified in the technical specification.
The MoF confirmed that it will be the obligation to verify persons in the following situations: entering the game area, logging into user accounts and, of course, at the moment of registration, which will mean that, within LB operation, an operator will verify the entry of a person in the Register during each insert of a user card into each specific terminal device; however, according to the representatives of the MoF, namely the Director, the system, in addition to the new registration of a participant, will not send a query to the ROB system, but only to the ROV system, which supposedly should work much better (only claim the representatives of the MoF). In the process of registering a participant to participate in gambling, each person, in cooperation with the ROB, will be assigned their unique HID, which should then be enough to clearly identify such a person.
Furthermore, some technical specifications of the whole system were introduced, but these will be confirmed by the MoF only after the announcement itself; some of them were subject to today’s discussion and, according to the MoF representatives, will be considered within the forthcoming technical specification; they include e.g. sensitivity of the system to accurately completed identification data of a participant in the context of machine-read ID cards, use of diacritics, umlaut letters, etc.
According to today’s statement, the official English version of this technical specification is not currently being prepared, it possibly could be in the future.
