The various gambling boards around South Africa have either sat, or will soon be sitting, to decide who should be awarded casino licences.
The opportunity to gamble, legally, in a form other than horse racing, will probably result in more people becoming involved in gambling activities.
It will also probably result in those who currently bet on the horses enjoying the new forms of gambling that will, or have, become available.
As a consequence of the increased opportunity to gamble, the question that you need to ask yourself if you do gamble is, should you be taxed on your winnings?
Generally, if you are someone who occasionally visits the casino and plays the roulette wheel or the slot machines, spending a few hundred rand as part of your evening's entertainment, any winnings would be fortuitous and treated as capital and therefore non-taxable in your hands.
Equally so, if you lose your few hundred rand, you may have great difficulty trying to convince the South African Revenue Services (SARS) that you should be allowed to deduct the amount you've lost against your taxable income.
The rules to be applied to gains and losses made from gambling are those for any other type of income, namely, are the sums capital or revenue in nature, and if you are looking for a deduction, are the amounts you've spent been laid out for the purposes of trade?
In establishing the capital or revenue nature of winnings or losses, the SARS will look at whether you have embarked on a profit-making scheme.
There is clearly a point at which the level and methodology of your gambling results in it ceasing to be a form of entertainment (as an occasional gambler) and starts to be a form of business (as a "professional" gambler). When this line is crossed may be difficult to define.
However, there has been some, albeit limited, case law on the subject relating mainly to horse racing.
These cases have demonstrated that if you systematically carry on gambling activities, the SARS may try to tax you.
Generally, for example, amounts won by racehorse owners and trainers will be treated as taxable. Similarly, if you make your living from gambling the SARS may treat you as a "professional" gambler and tax your winnings.
Clearly, in these instances, it is important that you are able to demonstrate what you have had to spend and what you have lost, so that you can deduct these amounts against any amounts that are taxable.
One of the judges in a Special Court income tax case set out quite succinctly what you would need to look at to establish if you have crossed the line from being an occasional gambler to a professional one, and simultaneously, put forward a rather apt view on the concept of gambling in general.
He said: "But where an ordinary punter simply lays a bet, or bets habitually, this conduct is so irrational from a business point-of-view that its gains cannot ordinarily be subject to payment of income tax".
The distinction he made between non-taxable betting and taxable betting arose between this situation and the one where "persons...have specialised knowledge and sources of particular information which may make their occupation less irrational by reducing substantially the purely arbitrary results of their efforts".
Most people tend to think that if they win when they are gambling, there is no question that the winnings could be taxable. In the majority of cases this perception is probably correct. But it is important to be aware that the rule is not a catch-all rule, and that there may be exceptions. You need to know if you are one of them in order to do the right thing when it comes to dealing with the SARS.