PCSO: STL contracts good until June 2013

Agents of small-town lottery (STL), a government-operated numbers game, are not scheduled to stop anytime soon because their contracts with the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) are good until the first half of 2013.

“Their contracts are until June 2013, so they are still there,” said PCSO Chairperson Margarita Juico.

President Benigno Aquino announced on Monday that STL would soon be stopped and would be replaced with a new numbers game that would benefit the government and host communities.

The new game Mr. Aquino was referring to was “Loterya ng Bayan,” which the PCSO has been promoting since last year, PCSO General Manager Jose Ferdinand Rojas II told the Philippine Daily Inquirer Tuesday.

Rojas said the new game, once finalized, would be rolled out by the end of the year and replace STL in June 2013.

The PCSO owns the franchise of the STL, which was started during the administration of the late President Corazon Aquino and revived in 2006 during the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

The President said the STL would be scrapped because it failed to stamp out “jueteng,” an illegal numbers racket.

As of 2010, the PCSO had authorized 29 STL agent-corporations in the country. STL has been operational only in 15 provinces and 4 cities, according to Rojas.

Front for ‘jueteng’

Archbishop Emeritus Oscar Cruz, an antigambling advocate, has claimed that jueteng lords are using the STL as a front for their operations. STL operators are accused of remitting just a small part of their collections to the PCSO, shortchanging the government.

“Cobradores” (collectors) employed by jueteng operators who bought STL franchises are known to show their IDs identifying themselves as legitimate collectors to avoid arrest.

The mechanics for STL and jueteng are almost identical. The only difference is that bets in jueteng involve a pair of numbers from 1 to 37. In STL, the choices are from 1 to 40.

Unlike the PCSO-run lotto, where draws are televised nationwide, STL draws are done locally.

STL cobradores in the City of San Fernando, like Rosalina Marucot, Antonio Garcia and Titong Cunanan, expressed concern about the President’s announcement to scrap STL.

On Tuesday, they went about collecting bets while wearing their STL identification cards. They swore they were not jueteng bet collectors.

“What will we eat if STL is stopped?” Garcia said.

They get 10 percent of the bets they collect. In Marucot’s case, that can run between P40 and P100 per draw. They get to earn more from “balato” (goodwill money), an amount shared by winners.

STL operations in Pampanga province remained in full swing, with draws held on Monday night and Tuesday morning.

Suncove Corp., an STL agent in Pampanga, said it had not received any order to stop the game.

Then Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo first reviewed STL operations in July 2010 to determine if it really was a front for jueteng.

“Removing STL is a policy that needed to be defined by the administration,” Robredo told the Inquirer in an interview in 2010.

In the absence of a policy, STL operations should be aboveboard and with safeguards “to make sure the government is properly benefiting from its proceeds,” he said.

Rojas said the PCSO was still fine-tuning the rules of Loterya ng Bayan which, according to him, could create more jobs if implemented nationwide.

“Loterya ng Bayan and STL have differences, especially in the employment aspect of the bet collectors,” Rojas said.

He said employees of Loterya ng Bayan, including bet collectors, who could reach up to 400,000, would have stable jobs and receive benefits that a regular employee gets.

“From the 100,000 to 125,000 employed under STL now, the jobs could rise up to 400,000, if all 80 provinces nationwide would have this new game,” Rojas said.

The PCSO, he said, would also authorize different variants for the lottery game, which may include three-digit lottery games.

“We learn to adapt to different cultures. You cannot have a game that is not popular,” Rojas said.

He said the PCSO would also require monthly retail receipts for every lottery outlet to track the money coming in, “so we would have stricter monitoring auditing procedures.”

Apart from this, quotas would be imposed on Loterya ng Bayan franchise holders so the PCSO would meet its targets, he said.

Laguna Rep. Danilo Fernandez, who earlier sought a congressional inquiry into low STL remittances, said the purpose of the new scheme was to ensure that operators give the government its rightful share.

“What the President wants is for the government not to be at the losing end,” Fernandez said in a phone interview.

He said he and Robredo had discussed the new guidelines three months before the latter and two pilots died in a plane crash in Masbate province.

Fernandez said they were just waiting for Malacañang to issue the guidelines for the Loterya ng Bayan which the PCSO would present to the House committee on games and amusements.

“Everyone’s entitled to apply as operator of the Loterya ng Bayan, as long as you have the technical know-how and the financial capacity,” an STL operator in Laguna said when asked if current STL franchise holders were vying for the new contracts.

Call it whatever

The STL operator, who asked not to be named, said that while the STL was used as a front for illegal jueteng in some provinces, especially in northern Luzon, “it’s quite unfair to those whose operations are legal, no matter how much we say that some of us are clean.”

He, however, expressed doubts that Loterya ng Bayan could eradicate jueteng.

“Call it whatever. It’s impossible to eradicate illegal gambling as long as the police consent to the illegal operations,” he said.

He said he and other operators were aware of the new gambling scheme that Malacañang was cooking up. He said that based on their previous meetings, the government was proposing a new sharing scheme.