The Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch now admits it made an “administrative error” after it published a report that showed Gaming Control Act violations skyrocketed by 735% last year.
The report for the year ended March 31, 2015 said GPEB recorded 3,215 violations, up from the 385 a year earlier. A spokesperson for the gambling regulator said there were actually only 305 violations in 2014-2015, which was a decrease of almost 21%. None, however, was reported to Crown counsel, according to the report that was tabled at a May 17 budget estimates hearing in the Legislature.
Brennan Clarke of the Ministry of Finance blamed the error on the inclusion of 2,910 incident reports of voluntary self-exclusions, a category that had been removed from the 2013-2014 report because it was deemed a B.C. Lottery Corporation responsibility – even though it is mentioned in the Gaming Control Act.
“The exclusion of VSEs and other prohibited patrons in the 2013-14 report, and the notes explaining the change, were supposed to carry through to the 2014-15 report,” Clarke said. “The intent was to continue reporting on that basis, and GPEB will report on that basis in next year as well.”
Brennan said, however, that the ministry is “not able to provide an exact breakdown” of the 305 violations, which include unauthorized lottery schemes, selling lottery tickets to minors, and allowing minors into casinos.
Clarke would also not explain why the violations table is the only chart in the annual report that is not published with a year-over-year comparison.
Though tabled May 17, the report was not immediately published. Mike de Jong, the finance minister in charge of gambling marketing and regulation, apologized to NDP critic David Eby for the report’s tardy release because it had been on his desk for several days. When it was published online, the report included a new footnote stating the figures were “revised,” but not corrected.
Unlike the GPEB report, which is more than a year old, the BCLC-published report on VSEs showed 9,652 incidents in which security staff identified and ejected individuals through ineligible wins and recognition technology. That was up from the 8,241 a year earlier.
GPEB’s decision not to include VSE statistics in its annual report coincided with high-profile court cases in which gamblers slammed the program as a failure.
In July 2014, a B.C. Supreme Court judge ruled that BCLC had to return jackpots withheld from excluded gamblers between April 2009 and June 2010.
The VSE program had operated since the late 1990s, before the Gaming Control Act,
but only in 2009 did BCLC begin to withhold jackpots.
Hamidreza Haghdust and Michael Lee sued BCLC to recover jackpot prizes of $35,000 and $42,484.67, respectively, that were won after they entered the exclusion program in 2007. The plaintiffs had signed their forms before BCLC adopted jackpot entitlement rules.
In a 2014 BCLC-commissioned report, it was estimated that 125,000 people in B.C. are problem gamblers with possible addictions. That is enough to fill B.C. Place Stadium twice and substantially occupy Rogers Arena.
An RCMP squad that specialized in targeting illegal gambling was shut down by the BC Liberal government in 2009 despite warning that it had intelligence of biker gangs infiltrating legitimate gambling operations. In April, de Jong announced a new squad, the Joint Illegal Gaming Investigation Team, would be formed with the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit. The government cited a spike in suspicious currency transactions at casinos to $20.7 million last July as a catalyst for the new squad.
