California Lottery gave away $212,500 in Scratchers on ‘Ellen.’ Now it’s under fire
When Ellen DeGeneres announced on her TV show that she wanted to make “one of our audience members a millionaire” as part of her annual “12 Days of Giveaways,” the crowd cheered.
“You are all getting a $500 package of lottery Scratchers,” she said on the Dec. 3 show. “You have to let me know if any of you hit it big. I get half.”
That didn’t sit well with a California State Lottery employee, who in a whistleblower complaint to the California State Auditor, accused lottery management of “gross incompetence, bullying, abusive conduct and abuse of power” and called the giveaway a “misuse of funds.”
The letter, obtained by the Sacramento Bee, states that boxes of Scratchers, intended as gifts for the audience, were left with DeGeneres’ producers.
“Staff knows that all unused promo tickets are always to be returned to the lottery or a justification for not adhering to the policies must be written,” according to the complaint.
California State Lottery officials confirmed to the Los Angeles Times that the tickets were given to producers at no charge, and there were 72 Scratchers valued at $500 per packet, with a combined face value of $212,500.
The giveaway created publicity for the games to help boost sales, lottery spokesman Russ Lopez said.
“The value of having the game touted by DeGeneres on her show was worth far more than the revenue lost by giving the tickets away, Lopez said,” according to the LA Times.
Last year, California state Sen. Ling Ling Chang requested an audit of the California State Lottery to look into the difference in lottery revenue and the money given to California’s public schools. The lottery in the 2017-18 state budget year sold about $7 billion in tickets and delivered about $1.3 billion to K-12 schools.
The State Auditor’s Office is expected to release another report on the California State Lottery in late February. The audit is expected to have a wide-ranging focus, investigating staffing levels, expenses, support for education and its processes for verifying winners.
“The lottery was created to fund schools and nothing more,” Chang said in a statement on her website. “Unfortunately, media reports over the past year have painted a negative picture of the California State Lottery as an agency under fire for wasteful spending and nepotism. Meanwhile, revenues for the lottery have skyrocketed while funds to schools have remained flat.”
“I’m deeply concerned after reading those media stories so that is why I requested for an independent audit of the California State Lottery,” she continued. “Every dollar wasted at the California State Lottery is another dollar taken away from students and from our public schools.”
The California State Lottery wrote that its mission is to “provide supplemental funding to California public schools,” according to its website. It says 95 cents of every dollar spent on the lottery goes to prizes, public schools and colleges.
DeGeneres is known for giving away grand prizes on her show. In 2018, DeGeneres gave the audience a shot at winning $1.6 billion by giving away Mega Millions lottery tickets, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
This story was originally published February 6, 2020 at 1:14 PM.