Report 2019-112 Recommendations

To ensure effective oversight of the Lottery, the SCO should immediately begin taking steps to improve its audits of the Lottery by doing the following:

-Develop and follow procedures that ensure that objections to audit findings are addressed by the audit team that worked on the audit. The procedures should provide the audit team sufficient time to interact directly with the Lottery about its objections and should direct the audit team to fully document its rationale for making any adjustments to the audit's findings before the audit report is published.

-Revise its risk assessment of the Lottery to include issues of efficiency and effectiveness of the Lottery's operations.

-Select high-risk areas of the Lottery's operations and conduct performance audits to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of those areas. In all audits of the Lottery, consider how the audit findings relate to the Lottery's purpose of providing education with the maximum possible funding.

To ensure that the Lottery provides the required amount of funding to education, the Legislature should require that the Lottery pay—from its administrative expense category—the $36 million to education it should have provided in fiscal year 2017-18.

To ensure that the Lottery adheres to the meaning of the 2010 amendments to the Lottery Act, the Legislature should amend the act to specify that the relationship between increases in its net revenue and increases in its education funding should be directly proportional.

To ensure that the Lottery is subject to oversight of its procurement practices, the Legislature should amend the Lottery Act to direct the SCO to conduct audits of the Lottery's procurement process at least once every three years.

To ensure that it provides the maximum amount of funding to education in future fiscal years, the Lottery should do the following:

-By August 2020, determine the optimal amount of prize payouts that maximizes the funding for education.

-By August 2020, establish a policy to annually reconsider the optimal amount of prize payouts that maximizes funding for education.

-Use this optimal prize amount when setting its budgets, beginning with the budget for fiscal year 2021-22.

To adhere to the Lottery Act's education funding requirements, beginning with fiscal year 2020-21, the Lottery Commission should require its staff to demonstrate that they have planned for education funding to be maximized and aligned with the proportionality requirement of the Lottery Act, and approve only those budgets that plan for such funding. It should then monitor actual education funding and ensure that it complies with the requirement.

To ensure that it conducts procurements in a way that preserves all possible funding for education, by August 2020, the Lottery should develop procurement procedures that, at a minimum, do the following:

-Provide examples of when products are truly available from only one source and examples of when the Lottery should consider whether alternative products can also fulfill its needs.

-Require its staff to collect and maintain documentation supporting any exception to competitive bidding and provide examples of adequate and inadequate documentation.

-Instruct its contracts unit to deny all procurement requests that do not demonstrate adherence to contracting requirements.

To ensure that it receives value for the funding it spends on its fairs program, by January 2021, the Lottery should determine whether the program has increased its brand strength, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, ticket sales, and profits. If the analysis determines that the Lottery has not achieved these benefits, it should terminate the program.