BC gaming enforcers blame “administrative error” for gaming violations spike

British Columbia’s gaming enforcers say they goofed by publishing data that showed a 735% rise in the number of Gaming Control Act (GCA) violations in the most recent fiscal year.

Last week, a Business in Vancouver article noted that BC’s Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch (GPEB) had released a report showing the number of GCA violations in the Canadian province rising from 385 in 2013-14 to a whopping 3,215 in 2014-15.

Shortly after CalvinAyre.com reported on this story, we were contacted by a GPEB rep who informed us that the data contained in the story was “inaccurate, by a large margin,” and requested that we take down the article in question “forthwith.” However, the rep declined to offer specifics on which aspects of the story were so inaccurate.

On Monday, Business in Vancouver published a followup that finally shed more light on the discrepancy. According to Brennan Clarke at the Ministry of Finance, an “administrative error” led the GPEB to mistakenly include 2,910 incident reports of voluntary self-exclusions by gamblers from BC-licensed gaming venues in the 2014-15 report. As a result, the actual number of GCA violations last year was 305, a 21% decline from the previous year’s report.