Easy Money
Wonder if there's any such thing. Easy money, that is. After all, you earn your daily keep by the sweat of your brow, as that old chestnut would have it. We work to enable us to live by the standards that our geography can afford us. It's not easy, but it's what we do. Some of us grudgingly, others among us willingly enough, but all of us with the realization that it's somehow never enough.
Of course there are other means available to the otherwise-enterprising among us, by somehow breaking the laws that protect us all, by resorting to illegal and generally unacceptable means of assembling funds sufficient unto the day. Among other methods there is always gambling. Easy money, found money, won-the-lottery money, hit-the-jackpot money.
Government, recognizing ill-gotten gains and the addiction travails of a good portion of any population, ruled gambling, gaming in all its forms illegal, forbidden, against the law. And then they got smart; just like the imposition of prohibition, realizing they were fighting a losing game, so to speak. People will resort to all manner of underhanded manoeuvring to enable themselves to hold out hope that they will somehow be blessed with success.
Everyone hankers after that legendary address: Easy Street. Each of us faces the daily or weekly or monthly insecurities that come with facing up to our responsibilities to pay all those bills that accumulate and fester and demand to be paid - or we face divestiture of all of our investments. And it's a dreadfully humbling and soil-destroying expedient to have to rely on the grumbling graces of government social agencies to feed one's family.
If you can't beat them you join them. Government allows itself to proffer a gambling alternative of its own, granting itself legitimacy it disallows private agencies - extension of this allowance granted to charitable enterprises which effectively gets government off the hook for handing out tax-funded grants - thus further encouraging the habit, giving it a thin veneer of respectability. The funds generated by lotteries, after all, go to charity.
Funny how we always think of government thinking up ways to fatten their tax-purse, and any means at all will do, thank you very much. Government as charity. Of course, they have our best interests in mind, don't they? All that extra revenue beyond and above taxation resources goes into the pot that produces our social infrastructure, the nourishment of a responsible society's fabric of well-being. Right.
Oh dear, there's an elephant trampling the rose bushes. A television investigative journalist had the temerity to interview a disgruntled lottery player, certain he had won a substantial sum, only to have it claimed by - well of all people, the very person from whom he bought the winning ticket. How utterly peculiar. Ontario's ombudsman, Andre Marin, then entered the picture and his office did its own investigation following the OlG's own white-wash.
What did he find? Well, surprise, surprise: Ontario retail store owners and their families illegally claimed roughly one-hundred million in lottery winnings between 1999 and 2006. Tens of millions of reported fraudulent claims were blithely ignored by the public lottery corporation, evidently. The provincial ombudsman is now accusing the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation of being fixated on profits to the detriment of the integrity of the system.
How's that? A government agency, serving the government fixated on profits? Hard to believe. The ombudsman claims that in a period of three months' investigation they isolated five distinct instances of retailers outright lying, claiming winning tickets as their own. Chalk it all down to human greed; what else? The retailers might say in their defence, who wouldn't, when it's so easy and there are no consequences other than to enjoy their illegal winnings?
After all, government still gets its money, scads of it. It's only the poor unfortunate ticket purchaser, daydreaming through spending a million dollars, and how it would monumentally improve his life and that of his family, and maybe even a little left over to charity... who eventually discovers it's just a crock. Will this stop him from buying tickets again? Not likely; he'll just be a little bit more canny about it.
As for the retailers, the ombudsman points out: "They lied about being retailers, they lied about where they got the tickets. That represents about $15-million paid to internal fraudsters. It's likely that over the course of the years, there's tens of millions of dollars paid to internal fraudsters." Well, yes, since their investigation revealed fraud of five specific instances. The real estimate balloons well beyond that measly point.
There have been 247 major lottery wins - ranging between $50,000 and $12.5 million - by lottery retailers, their employees and their families, as well as OlG employees, according to the report. Pretty damning, right? Retailers have been winning prizes at spectacular times the rate of the poor sod who goes into their establishment in the hopes he has an outside chance at hitting the big time.
Well, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation is busy mending the breach in protocol, er, the crooked activities. Despite the ombudsman's accusations that when investigations were first initiated they were just friendly little drop-ins, reminders that retailers should really exercise more - vigilance in what they're about. Now the report has been made public, however, they're really hoisting up their jeans - they've 'fired' the OlG's chief executive, Duncan Brown.
Lest Mr. Brown feel too burdened and upset by his change in circumstances, he went off into the horizon with a severance package to the tune of $720,000. That's balm for a sting of rejection.
Of course there are other means available to the otherwise-enterprising among us, by somehow breaking the laws that protect us all, by resorting to illegal and generally unacceptable means of assembling funds sufficient unto the day. Among other methods there is always gambling. Easy money, found money, won-the-lottery money, hit-the-jackpot money.
Government, recognizing ill-gotten gains and the addiction travails of a good portion of any population, ruled gambling, gaming in all its forms illegal, forbidden, against the law. And then they got smart; just like the imposition of prohibition, realizing they were fighting a losing game, so to speak. People will resort to all manner of underhanded manoeuvring to enable themselves to hold out hope that they will somehow be blessed with success.
Everyone hankers after that legendary address: Easy Street. Each of us faces the daily or weekly or monthly insecurities that come with facing up to our responsibilities to pay all those bills that accumulate and fester and demand to be paid - or we face divestiture of all of our investments. And it's a dreadfully humbling and soil-destroying expedient to have to rely on the grumbling graces of government social agencies to feed one's family.
If you can't beat them you join them. Government allows itself to proffer a gambling alternative of its own, granting itself legitimacy it disallows private agencies - extension of this allowance granted to charitable enterprises which effectively gets government off the hook for handing out tax-funded grants - thus further encouraging the habit, giving it a thin veneer of respectability. The funds generated by lotteries, after all, go to charity.
Funny how we always think of government thinking up ways to fatten their tax-purse, and any means at all will do, thank you very much. Government as charity. Of course, they have our best interests in mind, don't they? All that extra revenue beyond and above taxation resources goes into the pot that produces our social infrastructure, the nourishment of a responsible society's fabric of well-being. Right.
Oh dear, there's an elephant trampling the rose bushes. A television investigative journalist had the temerity to interview a disgruntled lottery player, certain he had won a substantial sum, only to have it claimed by - well of all people, the very person from whom he bought the winning ticket. How utterly peculiar. Ontario's ombudsman, Andre Marin, then entered the picture and his office did its own investigation following the OlG's own white-wash.
What did he find? Well, surprise, surprise: Ontario retail store owners and their families illegally claimed roughly one-hundred million in lottery winnings between 1999 and 2006. Tens of millions of reported fraudulent claims were blithely ignored by the public lottery corporation, evidently. The provincial ombudsman is now accusing the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation of being fixated on profits to the detriment of the integrity of the system.
How's that? A government agency, serving the government fixated on profits? Hard to believe. The ombudsman claims that in a period of three months' investigation they isolated five distinct instances of retailers outright lying, claiming winning tickets as their own. Chalk it all down to human greed; what else? The retailers might say in their defence, who wouldn't, when it's so easy and there are no consequences other than to enjoy their illegal winnings?
After all, government still gets its money, scads of it. It's only the poor unfortunate ticket purchaser, daydreaming through spending a million dollars, and how it would monumentally improve his life and that of his family, and maybe even a little left over to charity... who eventually discovers it's just a crock. Will this stop him from buying tickets again? Not likely; he'll just be a little bit more canny about it.
As for the retailers, the ombudsman points out: "They lied about being retailers, they lied about where they got the tickets. That represents about $15-million paid to internal fraudsters. It's likely that over the course of the years, there's tens of millions of dollars paid to internal fraudsters." Well, yes, since their investigation revealed fraud of five specific instances. The real estimate balloons well beyond that measly point.
There have been 247 major lottery wins - ranging between $50,000 and $12.5 million - by lottery retailers, their employees and their families, as well as OlG employees, according to the report. Pretty damning, right? Retailers have been winning prizes at spectacular times the rate of the poor sod who goes into their establishment in the hopes he has an outside chance at hitting the big time.
Well, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation is busy mending the breach in protocol, er, the crooked activities. Despite the ombudsman's accusations that when investigations were first initiated they were just friendly little drop-ins, reminders that retailers should really exercise more - vigilance in what they're about. Now the report has been made public, however, they're really hoisting up their jeans - they've 'fired' the OlG's chief executive, Duncan Brown.
Lest Mr. Brown feel too burdened and upset by his change in circumstances, he went off into the horizon with a severance package to the tune of $720,000. That's balm for a sting of rejection.
Labels: Life's Like That
posted by Pieface | 4:34 PM
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