Administrative

The Office of Charitable Gaming license and regulates the charitable gaming industry by ascertaining that organizations are complying with the Louisiana Law and Administrative Rules and Policies. The Office monitors these organizations by licensing all charitable gaming activities, conducting detailed audits of organizations, performing surprise inspections of games and managing comprehensive training sessions.

The Office works with the organizations that hold these games to certify that they understand their responsibilities when conducting charitable games as well as the reporting requirements for all their proceeds and expenses.

There are two divisions within the Office of Charitable Gaming (OCG):

Licensing

Seven different types of licenses are issued through OCG. The types of licenses consist of organizations (2 types), commercial lessors, distributors (2 types), manufacturers and electronic video machines.

Licensed events include charitable bingos, pull-tabs, raffles, electronic video bingo, keno and Las Vegas nights.

Any organization or person seeking licensure as a charitable gaming organization, commercial lessor, distributor or manufacturer must submit an application to the Office.

The Office issues new licenses and renews existing licenses on a yearly basis. The Office also modifies information such as: change in officers, change in members, change in schedules, ownership structures and any other changes that affect the licensing structure. These modifications are completed throughout the licensing year.

Auditing

The auditing staff is responsible for reviewing monthly and quarterly reports, conducting audits, inspections and training of organizations throughout the license year. This is done in order to obtain reasonable assurance that all licensed organizations are in compliance with enabling legislation and administrative rules of the Office as related to record keeping, banking, financial reporting and internal accounting control requirements. One of the major goals of the Office is to ensure that all net proceeds of charitable games are accounted for and are devoted to educational, charitable, patriotic, religious or public spirited uses.

For fiscal year ending June 2014, there were over 500 organizations conducting charitable activities. These organizations collected nearly $200 million in gross wagers and paid out nearly $144 million in prizes to players. These same organizations reflected charitable contributions in excess of $17 million for the fiscal year.