Charities Shortchanged by Failures in Provincial Lottery System

“Minister Davis needs to get serious about cleaning up the lottery management system in his department to ensure that the charities in this province receive every cent they are owed,” says Randy Edmunds, MHA for Torngat Mountains and critic for Service NL, the department responsible for lotteries licensing and regulatory compliance.

The 2012 report from the Auditor General found a disturbing level of sloppiness in government’s system of management of the licensing process and with the post-lottery auditing and compliance measures.  The licensing audit position has been vacant for more than 4 years – therefore financial reports were not properly reviewed and financial audits were not occurring - and the department has not even been able to set clear rules for when audited financial statements should be required.

Edmunds noted that, “We have to remember that the entire point of the provincial bingo and lottery system is to provide funds for qualified charities.  To ensure money goes to the right place, government has to closely monitor and audit the entire licensing process: ensuring only charity related groups receive valid licenses, ensuring that these lotteries are properly and fairly conducted and the funds collected through these lotteries are allocated properly to the corresponding qualified charities.”

In the fall of 2010, the Opposition Office looked into the issue of provincial lottery license administration through a Freedom of Information request.  When the department was asked for “Reports, summaries, background information, fact sheets, status updates or notes regarding the issue of charity bingo operations with respect to their past and/or current record of meeting charity disbursement requirements,” the department responded that they had “no records responsive to your request for access.”

“Thanks to Government’s obsession with secrecy, they have rejected, obstructed and interfered with every form of responsible democratic oversight from the Auditor General to Freedom of Information requests to opening the House of Assembly,” Edmunds concluded.