Regulation of the gambling industry needs to be strengthened through the National Gaming Authority. This is what the French Court of Auditors suggests. In this perspective, the Court recommends "establishing, within the ANJ, a multidisciplinary monitoring, collection, analysis and research center specialized in games" by 2024.
Faced with a rapidly expanding and changing gambling sector, the Court of Auditors recommends in a report published on Thursday that regularization be “strengthened” by strengthening the National Gaming Authority (ANJ). Since the 90s, the sector has experienced "significant revolutions" between openness to competition and digitalisation, the Court recalls. Given that almost half of French adults gamble, the highest financial court recommends “consolidating” the powers of the National Gaming Authority (ANJ), established in 2020.
“This is not a criticism, it is an incentive to do more, to do better in terms of regulation”, its president, Pierre Moscovici, underlined to the press, recalling that it is a “newly born authority”. The ANJ does not have its own sanctioning power. If operators do not comply with their obligations, they can refer the matter to the Sanctions Commission. Between incentive and sanction, an intermediate lever is the warning to operators to comply with the authority's requests. However, this instrument currently falls exclusively under the jurisdiction of the Sanctions Commission.
The Court of Auditors therefore proposes to "give the president of the ANJ the possibility, before referring it to the sanctions commission, to order operators to comply with his requests". “If the president of the ANJ were delegated the power to issue this warning and make it public, he could act more quickly than he does today.” According to Pierre Moscovici, the ANJ should also have “strengthened expertise in relation to technological changes”, a necessary condition to continue “the development of tools to block illegal sites”.
In this perspective, the Court recommends "establishing, within the ANJ, a multidisciplinary monitoring, collection, analysis and research center specialized in games" by 2024. For the Court of Auditors, the ANJ will also have to define its doctrine of action in the next strategic plan to better define one of the objectives assigned to it: "to guarantee compliance with the balanced exploitation of the different types of gaming, in order to avoid any economic destabilization of the sectors concerned.
