INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines — Senators urged Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) officials on Monday to run after Small Town Lottery (STL) operators who failed to pay the government P5 billion — its guaranteed share of their revenues between 2016 and 2020.
At a Senate committee on games and amusement hearing, Senators Raffy Tulfo, Robinhood Padilla, Aquilino Pimentel III, and Ronald dela Rosa expressed surprise over the huge amount of uncollected guaranteed minimum monthly retail receipts which was revealed under questioning by lawyer Lyssa Grace Pagano, chief of staff of PCSO General Manager Melquiades Robles.
PCSO Board Chair Junie Cua, who took over the agency in July, said he was shocked as well.
“I’m not aware of this information and these are operational matters that should have been looked into and brought to the attention of the board. We have taken note of all of those things,” Cua told the senators.
Aside from collecting the amount due to the government, the PCSO should have charged the unscrupulous STL operators in court, according to Padilla and Tulfo, who presided over the hearing as subcommittee chair.
Pimentel, the Senate minority leader, chided the PCSO officials led by Cua for having allowed the practice to persist.
“This is such a huge amount. It shows that there’s a big weakness in [PCSO’s] contracts with STL operators if [personnel] allowed the [unremitted revenue] to reach this level; the burden falls on you because [STL operators] carry the name of the PCSO,” Pimentel said.
Connivance?
Tulfo, meanwhile, said it was highly possible that some PCSO personnel had connived with some of the delinquent operators who, after not remitting the government’s share, simply shut down their company and then applied for a new license.
“So in this case, it’s not hit-and-run, but hit-and-hit,” he said, adding that the subcommittee would ask the PCSO at the next hearing on what steps it had taken to recover the uncollected P5 billion.
STL was first introduced during the term of former President Corazon Aquino in a bid to abolish the illegal numbers game “jueteng.”
Both involve betting on two-number combinations although STL draws are done locally as compared to the PCSO’s lotto draws which are televised.
The similar mechanics between jueteng and STL, however, prompted jueteng operators to use STL as a front. In 1990, a House inquiry discovered that STL franchises had been given to the same people behind jueteng.
In 2005, former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo revived STL and tasked the PCSO to help in the campaign to eradicate jueteng. The new reinforced STL was launched in February 2006 in several areas in Luzon and the Visayas. By 2007, it had generated more than P3 billion in revenues and created about 62,500 jobs for displaced bet collectors and supervisors, as well as employees of the agent corporations.