LITTLE ROCK — Arkansas’ lottery will start selling tickets for a new draw game on Aug. 27 with ticket sales for the game projected at $6 million in the next year, the lottery’s director told the Arkansas Lottery Commission on Monday.
Director Bishop Woosley said lottery players will pay $1 for each ticket to the game, called the Natural State Jackpot, and select five numbers for each play. He said the size of the jackpot starts at $25,000, and the average jackpot should be about $158,000 based on sales estimates and odds.
The drawings will be held Monday through Saturday at 8 p.m., he said.
“We are hopeful that it will catch on and take off.”
The lottery projects sales from all types of tickets totaling $480.5 million and raising $98 million in net proceeds for college scholarships in the fiscal year that started July 1.
In the fiscal year that ended June 30, the lottery’s ticket sales from all tickets that it sells totaled $473 million as it raised $97.5 million for college scholarships. In the previous fiscal year, the lottery sold $464 million in tickets and raised $94.2 million for scholarships.
“We hope to have steady, incremental growth in net proceeds,” Woosley said.
So far for the 2012-2013 school year, the state Department of Higher Education has awarded 13,484 lottery-financed Academic Challenge scholarships from 31,296 applications, said Shane Broadway, the department’s interim director.
He said the department has awarded scholarships to 4,033 other applicants and is waiting for the students to accept the awards; some of these applicants might attend college out of state or not attend college at all, and it has determined that 397 of the applicants aren’t eligible for the scholarships. It hasn’t determined the eligibility for 13,382 applicants who didn’t send in their high school transcripts, ACT scores and other information and “we’ll never likely hear from [them],” he said.
Broadway said later that he expects the department to hand out more than 32,000 to 33,000 Academic Challenge scholarships in the next school year, which would be the third consecutive year that it gave out more than 30,000 scholarships.
Commissioner Bruce Engstrom of North Little Rock wondered how much of the lottery-financed scholarship “has been eaten up by tuition increases.”
Broadway said the tuition increases at the state’s higher education institutions have been about the same prior to and since the creation of the lottery.
“I haven’t seen anything as of yet that tells me that it’s going up because of the lottery scholarship,” he said.
In other business, the lottery’s Internal Auditor Matthew Brown, who was hired last month, told the commission that he estimates it would take 1,654 hours to complete work on the commission’s audit plan for the last fiscal year, so he intends to delay work on two audit projects to reduce that estimated time to complete the fiscal year 2012 work in 1,374 hours.
Work conducted on several audit projects has been lost as a result of the departure of two audit employees from the lottery, he said, and that was factored into his time estimate, he said.
The lottery’s former internal auditor, Michael Hyde, submitted his resignation to the commission in mid-May, after several members of the commission said they had become exasperated with him for questioning the validity of a contract with scratch-off ticket vendor Scientific Games International and a divided commission voted to confirm the contract’s validity.
Hyde and his former aide at the lottery, Whitnie Hall, departed the lottery at the end of June and started working for the state Department of Human Services in July.
The commission on Monday authorized upgrading the auditor position that Hall held at an annual salary of $41,718 to increase its salary range of $25,268 to $46,351 to a range of $41,159 to $72,670. The commissioners said their approval would be needed for any salary level above $55,490 a year.
Brown said upgrading the position would ensure the lottery would be able to attract the most qualified person for the job, such as someone who is a certified public accountant with experience. He said he envisions training whoever is hired for the job to do his own job as internal audit within six months to a year.
Engstrom said he wants the commission to adopt a policy in September to no longer delegate or severely limit itself from delegating its powers to its executives, citing its delegation of powers to former Director Ernie Passailaigue in handling the Scientific Games contract.
The commission also approved paying lottery licensing specialist Susan Chamberlain, whose salary is $34,169 a year, $48,000 a year to be the lottery’s licensing manager.
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 07/31/2012