Year End Trends

Interestingly, even with intermittent activity in 2020, the profit decrease was about $7,000,000, which is very minimal, even though the overall amount wagered decreased by about $56,000,000. Bingo showed the largest decrease because of COVID-19 State mandated social distancing and shut downs:

Raffles were able to navigate the COVID-19 State mandated requirements with online sales, socially distanced drawings and many donated prizes. Raffle revenue was down by a little over $3,000,000 with net profit up just about $800,000 from 2019.

Complete numbers can be found on bingo and raffles home page under the charitable gaming financial reports.

Where is My Current License?

To all licensees who apply online for their bingo-raffle license; once you receive the confirmation that your license submission has been approved in an e-mail, and you see your 2021 license number displayed in that e-mail, you will not receive a follow-up e-mail containing your license, and your license will not be attached to this e-mail. Basically, this is telling you that your application has been processed and accepted, and is signaling you that you can now log-in to your account online, and at any time print your current 2021 license. To do this, just sign into your account with your organization’s master ID and password, and once you are in the summary page, scroll to the bottom under “actions” and look for “view and print license”. Once you click this, it will then create a PDF of your current license which you can then print off at any time. If you have any questions regarding this process, please feel free to contact our office.

What Does "Amend" Mean on the Quarterly Report Page?

After filing a quarterly report and the report being approved by our office, you will see Amend next to this and some prior quarterly reports. THIS DOES NOT MEAN THE QUARTERLY NEEDS TO BE AMENDED. This is simply stating the licensee has the ability to amend the reports with this wording next to it, if needed (such as the licensee sees that something in the report was reported incorrectly and needs to be changed).

Additionally, please remember, amending a prior quarter will lock out the ability to do other functionality, such as filing your next quarter report, filing a change, or being able to renew your license, until the amendment is submitted and approved.

Also, amending a prior quarter is not the same as filing the next quarter report. Amending a prior report does just that, it changes the filing, much like sending an amendment in paper format. If you incorrectly go in to “amend” a report and do not wish to actually file an amendment, you can go to the summary page for the quarterlies and click on “reset filing”. This will close the report with the original data and you can proceed with submitting the next quarterly, change or renewal.

E-Filing a Bingo-Raffle License Renewal

Please remember, if you wish to continue to conduct charitable games of chance in 2021, you will need to renew your Bingo-Raffle license for 2021 before starting or continuing any games into 2021. All 2020 Bingo-Raffle licenses expired December 31, 2020. The Secretary of State's office encourages groups to file online. If renewing online, the licensee can access their online account and use the “renew” link on their account’s summary page. Please do not create a new account as these filings will need to be rejected and resubmitted through your already existing account.

When filing online, the system will only accept credit or debit cards; we do not have ACH or the ability to directly transfer funds from your accounts. The card, however, does not have to be linked directly to the bingo-raffle account. A personal card could be used (we do not retain any card information once the submission is made to our office), and then be reimbursed from the bingo-raffle account (we will need adequate descriptions on the schedule A that the reimbursement was for a “loan” to repay the person using their personal card for this payment). Also, the group has the option of obtaining a prepaid card where it can be loaded with the appropriate amount to cover the payment.

Games Manager Training

Your organization must have at least one certified Games Manager in order to run charitable games. We recommend licensees maintain more than one Games Manager. To support this, we offer in-person and online Games Manager training courses.

Sign up for the online eLearning course on our website.

All live classes have currently been cancelled due to COVID 19. Please go to the this link for further updates on live classes.

Investigator Tips

Each quarter, we include a few tips from our Bingo/Raffle Investigators. They gather a lot of information in the field with areas where licensees have compliance challenges. By sharing this information, we hope that licensees can better serve their customers.

A MESSAGE FROM THE INVESTIGATORS-DAILY FORMS TUTORIAL:

For our licensees that fill out the bingo daily forms, and would like to take a refresher on how to complete these forms outside of the games manager’s training course, we have good news! The games manager training course has always been available to anyone wanting to retake the course or update themselves on current rules/laws, and is still completely free to register for and take (the fee is required if an individual actually needs to be certified or re-certified). However, individuals could not just go to the forms section of the Bingo-Raffle training and complete this one portion. We have now introduced this ability (though going through this forms refresher does not count toward the training and cannot be substituted for the part of the training that has you complete the forms).

To access this refresher, you can go to the forms list on the Bingo-Raffle home page, and then scroll down to the end of the daily forms. You will see a link labeled Forms Tutorial, which will allow you to access this refresher module (or you can link to it directly here). Again, this refresher cannot be considered a substitution for retaking the training to become certified/recertified, or taken in place of this section of the bingo-raffle training. We do hope, however, this assists with understanding how to complete the daily forms, or is a helpful reminder of how to complete these forms. Please feel free to contact our office at 303 894 2200 if you have questions.

You can access all bingo/raffle laws using our Bingo-Raffles Law Handbook. Please feel free to contact our office with any questions.