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Ireland’s National Lottery regulator confirmed it withheld €23,000 from operator Premier Lotteries Ireland (PLI) due to a licence breach, which saw some players told their tickets were not a winner, when in fact they had won.
The Office of the Regulator of the National Lottery (ORNL) published its annual report for 2023 on October 16. In a separate press release on the same day, ORNL confirmed details of the licence breach, which PLI flagged to the regulator, that occurred between September 2022 and October 2022.
A third-party software release allowed players to use the “Check My Numbers” tool on the National Lottery website while draw results were still being verified, leading to winning tickets being declared as losing tickets.
PLI did not profit from the error, fixed the issue, and returned the €2,299 unclaimed prizes to players as prizes in other National Lottery games as directed by the ORNL.
Regulator of the National Lottery, Carol Boate, said: “Every breach is a serious matter for my office as reflected in my decision to withhold €23,000 in funds from the operator and ensure a permanent technical solution to my full satisfaction.
“I do not underestimate the potential impact that this technical error could have had on a larger prize winner. I therefore, in addition, commissioned an independent assessment of the operator’s full suite of prize-checking systems to give added assurance to my office, players and the public,” Boate said.
Mitigating factors in the regulator's decision-making regarding the enforcement action included the operator not profiting from the incident, no loss to the National Lottery Fund, controls in place that flagged the “Not foreseeable” failure, the operator taking steps to address the technical issue “as soon as it occurred”, and the operator returning the expired unclaimed prizes to players via a €40,000 Tellybingo Snowball prize.
Sales decreased by 6.2 percent compared to 2022 and only €241.0 million was transferred from the National Lottery Fund to the Exchequer to support Good Causes in 2023, a 6.6 percent decrease compared to 2022.
La Française des Jeux (FDJ), which completed the purchase of PLI from the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan on November 3, 2023, will be hoping to reverse the National Lotteries continued decrease in sales.
Separately, the National Lottery will be unaffected and will continue to be regulated by the ORNL when the long-awaited Gambling Regulation bill, which includes a raft of major changes including the creation of the Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland, is enacted, having been passed on October 16.
A spokesperson for the ORNL told Vixio GamblingCompliance: “The arrival of internet gambling utterly changed the landscape for problem gambling and I look forward to the Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland coming fully into being.”
“The Regulator and the CEO designate of the new Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland have met many times and are committed to sharing learnings and expertise to address the societal issue of problem gambling with effective regulation,” the ORNL said.
