For so long now, the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) has been invariably accused of corruption and poor governance.
The accusations are many – from systemic corruption; wrong beneficiaries; LOTTO business cornered by two players for almost 30 years now; delinquent LOTTO outlets; co-mingling of funds; paper supplier for 50 years; under-declaration of revenues to reduce taxes; misappropriation of funds; to malversation.
PCSO’s Small Town Lottery (STL) is in truth a “Jueteng” redux, now under legal cover – with a high cost of franchise and “Jueteng” lords reportedly dominating the scene.
STL is, by and large, run via manual and decentralized operations. Thus, it is vulnerable to loose controls; rigged draws; under-collection and under-reporting of bets and other financial figures; collection difficulties; delayed or non-payment of prizes; collection leakages; and many more.
On the other hand, LOTTO is electronic and centralized. Thus, printing and collection of bets are monitored centrally and in real time; draws are public and transparent; bets and payment of prizes are monitored centrally, and settled immediately.
Yet on another note, another gaming agency, the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR, has done relatively well over the years. PAGCOR is a government-owned and controlled corporation established through Presidential decree. PAGCOR is the Philippines’ third largest contributor of revenue to the government, after the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the Bureau of Customs.
The solution: Merge PCSO with PAGCOR through legislation, and perform the following:
- Focus on generating revenues through gaming and lottery;
- Allocate earnings, net of operating expenses, as funding for calamity-stricken areas, health care services, and the like, to the appropriate government agencies which should also take care of distributing such benefits; and
- STL is just a numbers game. It should be folded into Lotto, designed with electronic, centralized and transparent collections of bets, operating through small LOTTO agents.
After a thorough investigation, the urgent need to clean up PCSO and STL will be clear to our legislators.
At present, the privatization of PAGCOR & STL is under consideration. However, the bigger issue is gaming, which is generally a monopoly. But an evaluation of whether gaming would be better owned by either the government or the private sector, is another topic altogether.