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Gaming Technology Helps Monitor New Mexico Casinos

"The Gaming Control Board there, in conjunction with the gaming commissions of the state's 10 gaming tribes and pueblos, has begun testing what it calls `telecommunication accounting systems' designed to monitor wager and payment activity at the slot machines in New Mexico's casinos. Such oversight will enable officials to accurately determine the amount of each tribe's payment to the state under the terms of gaming compacts agreed upon in 2001.

"`What we're actually doing is tying into the [tribes'] slot accounting systems via their modems and doing an extract file from their slot data system on a daily basis,' Greg Saunders, Chief Information Officer for the New Mexico Gaming Control Board, told ICT.

"…Under terms of the 2001 compacts, New Mexico's pueblos agreed to pay the state an annual regulatory fee of $100,000 in addition to eight percent of all slot-machine revenues. New Mexico's Indian casinos contain approximately 10,000 slot machines.

"In the 2001 compact negotiations, a compromise was worked out that would give the state data to audit against but would also address tribal sovereignty concerns.

"…Proper and fair enforcement of compact terms is, of course, important and certainly in the best interests of both the state and the pueblos. It looks as if New Mexico's tribes and gaming regulators have forged a compromise that will benefit both sides. Sovereignty concerns are respected by having regulators work remotely, while the regulators now have direct access to slot machine data for audit purposes…"

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