The Social Insurance Institution of Finland, Kela, says it will start taking into account the money spent on gambling in its decisions on providing assistance.
To date, Kela has only taken into account winnings from gambling when making decisions on social assistance. Now, Kela has announced updated guidelines that will also take into account the money spent gambling.
In practice, Kela’s claims specialists will look at customers’ gambling accounts to calculate the difference between stakes and winnings.
In Finland, gambling games are run by the state-owned company Veikkaus.
In order to gamble, players need to identify themselves and register as customers of Veikkaus. Compulsory identification enables the authorities, Veikkaus or players themselves to impose restrictions on gambling. Players can also exclude themselves from gambling and monitor data on their gambling consumption.
Kela’s new guidelines are meant to prevent situations in which social assistance recipients are put into an unreasonable position because they have winnings from gambling.
Up until now all winnings, no matter how small, have been counted as income that reduces the amount of social assistance, even if the customer has used those winnings to gamble more and lost all of their winnings.
Problem gambling
Under the new guidelines, Kela will start to look at winnings over a longer period of time rather than at one-off transactions.
Kela says it also aims to prevent financial difficulties among those receiving social assistance and to help prevent the harm caused by gambling problems.
“We at Kela do not tell our customers how they should use their social assistance, but naturally we are concerned if people with a low income use their money on gambling. Social assistance is a last-resort form of financial assistance meant to be used for the payment of daily living expenses such as rent and food. We want to help those whose financial problems are made worse by gambling,” Marja-Leena Valkonen, Benefits Manager at Kela, stated in a Friday press release.
According to Kela, 5 percent of social assistance recipients use their social assistance for gambling. Kela can alert social services in a customer’s wellbeing services county to their gambling problem, but only with the customer’s consent.
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