Despite Investigative Report, Lottery's Accounting Firm Denies Blame In Drawing Snafu

An investigative report on the $1.375 million, New Year’s Day lottery blunder spreads blame among the Connecticut Lottery Corp., state Department of Consumer Protection (DCP), and a national accounting firm hired to send an observer to the drawing to verify that proper procedures were followed.

But that accounting firm, Marcum LLP, is denying all culpability in the snafu despite a contract with the lottery corporation requiring it to “[o]bserve] that … the Lottery’s Official Drawing Procedures … are followed by the drawing personnel.”

“Put simply, Marcum had no responsibility for the error in the drawing of the Connecticut Lottery Super Draw Game … on Jan. 1,” Leslie Adler, the firm’s general counsel, wrote Jan. 29 to the lottery corporation.

Marcum’s assertion of non-responsibility clashes with the investigative findings of DCP, which Thursday issued the report on its investigation of the Jan. 1 drawing disaster in its role as the state’s regulator of the quasi-public lottery corporation.

Marcum’s name comes up repeatedly in the seven-page investigative report by DCP Gaming Director William Ryan and DCP investigator James Jepsen. The report says a five-member team that botched the Jan. 1 drawing included a Marcum representative and two employees each from the lottery corporation and DCP.

“The investigation concluded that the error occurred as a result of the Drawing Team deviating from approved official drawing procedures,” the DCP report said, adding that “safeguards failed for this particular game.”

That finding and others in Thursday’s report parallel recent stories in The Courant about how the Jan. 1 drawing went awry. The DCP’s communications director, Lora Rae Anderson, has said it happened this way:

The five-member team for the drawing had the benefit of illustrated instructions — in the form of printed “Official Drawing Procedures” — for how to enter the correct high and low ticket numbers into the electronic machine that selects the winners.
Those printed procedures emphasized that ticket numbers went upward from a low of 100001 — so the second ticket would be 100002, the third 100003, and so on. With, 214,601 tickets sold, the range of eligible tickets should have been 100001 at the low end, and 314601 at the top.
But the lottery employee who led the team instead entered 214601 as the top number, omitting the 100,000 tickets numbered from 214602 through 314601. And the DCP and Marcum representatives didn’t catch the error.

However, Marcum now is denying any responsibility in the Jan. 29 letter that Adler, its general counsel, sent to the lottery — which surfaced for the first time Thursday as one of several exhibits attached to the report.

Adler said that Marcum’s member of the drawing team, Keith Lewis, has stated that at the Jan. 1 drawing at a lottery corporation in Rocky Hill, he was handed a two-page “checklist” by one of the DCP’s representatives on the team. The checklist was not as detailed or as well-illustrated as the full “Official Drawing Procedures.”

The DCP representative advised Lewis “to follow the checklist” — even though Lewis had in his possession a copy of the full set of illustrated procedures, and had said he intended to use them, Adler wrote in the Jan. 29 letter.

However, the DCP’s report Thursday gave a different account. It said that the “checklist” was produced by the lottery corporation, not DCP — and that even though the drawing team “was permitted to use a checklist to assist with the Drawing, it was not an official, approved document and did not replace the Official Drawing Procedures.”

Asked about Adler’s assertions on behalf of Marcum Thursday, Anderson said that the DCP’s finding is based on a video taken of the drawing — and, she added, "At no point in the video of the drawing does DCP hand Marcum staff a checklist, nor does anyone direct Marcum staff to use a checklist as a replacement for the official game procedures."

Thursday’s DCP report said that Marcum “has not responded to DCP’s requests for documents and other information,” as well as “multiple requests to interview the Marcum employee that was on the Drawing Team” — that is, Lewis.

The lottery corporation is working on a separate investigation into the Jan. 1 problem, but has yet to issue any report. It held a make-up drawing in mid-January that cost an additional $1.375 million in prize money but still has left many lottery players angry.

The lottery corporation paid Marcum $60,800 in 2017 as its regular outside accountant. The heavyweight accounting firm has offices from coast to coast including four in Connecticut.

Meanwhile, Rep. Joe Verrengia, co-chairman of the General Assembly’s public safety committee, says he will call an investigative hearing on the drawing snafu in coming weeks, adding that a particular focus will be Marcum — which he says should bear some financial responsibility.

The lottery corporation’s interim CEO, Chelsea Turner, has not commented on whether her agency thinks Marcum should be held financially responsible.

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