In order to fund relief efforts after Colombia was hit by major flooding the Ministry of Finance Germán Ávila, has announced that the government is once again considering new taxes on gambling.

“While discussing some complementary measures to the corporate income tax, the possibility of making an adjustment to the games of chance tax. We are considering it as one of the possibilities, modifying the structure of the tax to the extent that it was already contemplated in the previous emergency, as well as the relief measures that have been repeatedly requested, because this has generated a dynamic of quick revenue for DIAN (Colombia’s government agency responsible for managing national taxes, customs, and international exchange controls),” the minister said.

This measure would be added to other actions taken by the Government within the declaration of economic emergency to raise resources to assist those affected by severe flooding.

The disaster management agency UNGRD reports that heavy rains have triggered over 130 emergencies across 181 municipalities in recent weeks. Flooding from the rainfall has affected more than 69,000 families across half of Colombia’s 32 departments.

More than 870 square kilometres are underwater, according to UNGRD. The 30-day emergency decree enables the government to deploy emergency funds to the regions hardest hit by the climate crisis.

The Finance Ministry intends to issue emergency tax decrees to raise about $2.2 billion (COP 8 trillion) for relief efforts and to repair infrastructure damaged by the floods.

If the tax measures are approved, it would mark another instance of the government using an emergency decree to increase taxes on the market.

In February 2025 Colombia’s then Minister of Finance, Diego Guevara, announced that, based on the state of emergency decree due to the security crisis in Catatumbo, VAT would be implemented on online gambling.

The government later tried to make this tax permanent but in November Colombia’s Senate rejected it as well as other tax reforms.

However, in December Germán Ávila confirmed that the government would implement new taxes and tax adjustments in response to the economic emergency caused by the recent funding shortfall, a consequence of the failure of the financing law in Congress including taxes on gambling.

But in a major blow for the administration this too was rejected when Colombia’s Constitutional Court provisionally suspended the economic emergency decree with which the executive branch had sought to raise 16.3 trillion pesos (about US$ 4.465 billion dollars) to complete the 2026 national budget.

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