The VGCCC is cracking down on Tabcorp with a one million dollar fine. A separate six-figure fine is not far behind, with 27 charges for allowing a minor to gamble. The minor(s) gambled at eight venues that Tabcorp had monitoring responsibility for. Each of the venues, bar one, are within an easy bicycle or public transport commute, fuelling speculation that it was the same minor visiting each of the venues.
The Victorian Gambling Commission is unimpressed with Tabcorp’s lack of cooperation with the investigation.
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A Cool One Million
The Victorian Gambling and Casino Control Commission’s (VGCCC) million-dollar fine against Tabcorp is the largest that they have ever doled out to the behemoth corporation. The reason for it is not what you’d expect. At the 2020 Spring Races, Tabcorp’s Wagering and Betting System (WBS) was offline for about a day and a half. Tabcorp blames third-party service providers, however, the fine is not for the system being down.
“The fine is for Tabcorp’s interference with the investigation of the outage.”
Under the Wagering and Betting Agreement of the Victorian Gambling Regulation Act (2003), the WBS needs to be “operational and available at all times” to pay prizes and sell tickets among other things. This is called an Availability Requirement. Tabcorp can avoid being blamed for non-compliance with the Availability Requirement if there is a failure in communication systems outside of their control.
Tabcorp has officially stated that the WBS being offline for so long was due to a third party. It was outside of their control. The Licensee (Tabcorp) is meant to act in good faith. In the case of the 2020 major system outage, this means that they should have volunteered any materials the Regulator required. They did not volunteer the requisite information and the Regulator had to give formal Directions for it to be made available.
Even then, Tabcorp continued to get in the way of the Regulator. The VGCCC needed to establish the cause of the outage and that it would not occur again. Tabcorp gave a piecemeal report to the VGCCC about this. The independent Deloitte assessor Tabcorp employed was purportedly unable to even define what the parameters were for the system to be “continuously available”.
The VGCCC then gave a Second Direction to Tabcorp, stipulating with greater detail what those parameters could be. They faulted Tabcorp for not being proactive in seeking out the definition of parameters when the report was first requested. After an extension, Tabcorp was even then four months late providing the final report regarding compliance ability. The Commission found Tabcorp’s lack of cooperation to be of concern.
The maximum fine that Tabcorp could have received is AU$9,087,000.
Gender Parity Update for Tabcorp
Senior management at Tabcorp lags behind in gender parity, with only two of eight (25%) female. This is below the average for Australia. Both females cover traditional feminised areas – human resources and customer experience.
Females on the Board of Directors are now at three, up from two, with this year’s appointment of Karen Stocks to the Board. Karen is currently the Vice President of Global Measurement Solutions at Google and was a founding Managing Director of Twitter Australia. Among her many other impressive past positions, Karen was on the board of Netball Australia.
