Romania’s gambling regulator, ONJN, has made significant strides in modernising its internal control systems, according to a new report from the country’s Court of Auditors.
The same Court of Auditors triggered a major scandal at the start of 2025 when it revealed that more than €900m in taxes were missing from ONJN’s financial records.
That discovery caused immediate upheaval at the top of the regulator, with the then-President resigning and opening the door for new leadership to take charge.
Vlad-Cristian Soare stepped in as the new head of ONJN in May 2025, pledging to overhaul the authority’s transparency and operational effectiveness from the ground up.
The Court of Auditors has now confirmed in its 2025 report that meaningful progress has been achieved under Soare’s leadership across several key regulatory areas.
One notable improvement concerns the monitoring of monthly declarations submitted by land-based gambling operators, a process the Court of Auditors said was completely absent throughout 2024.
Oversight of iGaming licensees was similarly weak or entirely missing in 2024, but ONJN has since partnered with Romania’s Digital Authority to build a real-time metadata analysis system for detecting suspicious transactions.
The Responsible Gambling Promotion Service also came under fire, as the Court of Auditors found it had been collecting funds without a single problem gambling campaign on record.
That situation has since been addressed through the creation of a new state programme designed to channel funds into gambling harm prevention and treatment projects, with the first grant recipients set to receive a combined total of €5m.
Soare has also moved to modernise Romania’s self-exclusion infrastructure, coordinating the development of a new system and proposing an Emergency Ordinance to fast-track the necessary policy changes.
Speaking about the auditing report’s findings, Soare stated: “We are not just talking about administrative responses to some findings, but about concrete changes: controls on the last five fiscal years, recovery of differences due, monitoring of online operators, combating the black market, financing addiction prevention and treatment programs and transforming self-exclusion into a functional and digitalized system.”
He added: “There are still things to be done, but the changes are visible, the problems are identified, the measures are underway, and the results can be verified.”
The reforms represent one of the most comprehensive regulatory overhauls Romania’s gambling sector has seen in recent years, with pressure on ONJN to maintain momentum into 2026 and beyond.
