SEARCH NEWS:

 

Canada: Western lottery clerks claiming high number of prizes

"CBC News hired Jeffrey Rosenthal, a statistics professor at the University of Toronto, to review a 2007 report prepared for the lottery corporation by the consulting firm Ernst & Young.

"Ernst & Young found that Western Canada Lottery Corporation clerks are winning prizes at a rate that is only slightly higher than it should be — 1.16 times. Clerks won 67 of 1,586 prizes of $10,000 or more awarded to western Canadians between 2003 and 2006.

"...But Rosenthal took issue with the way Ernst & Young calculated the rate of insider wins, saying the firm misinterpreted figures for the number of retailers who play and used old estimates of how many retailers there are per lottery outlet.

"Rosenthal said 67 insider wins is, in fact, 1.94 times higher than it should be. Statistically, retailers should only have won 34 times between 2003 and 2006 — and there's less than a one in 2.3 million chance that they could have won 67 times.

"...Ontario Ombudsman André Marin, who investigated the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) and uncovered major problems, said the western lottery should have been subject to an independent review, as other lotteries have been..."

< Gaming News