Ontario lottery corporation board resigns

TORONTO - The board of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation resigned en mass Monday as lavish expense claims by senior executives at the troubled agency surfaced.

Over the last two years, senior staff at the OLG billed taxpayers for, among other things: expensive bottles of wine, a Weight Watchers membership, babysitters, luggage replacement, credit card fees, and a cloth grocery bag, according to documents released by the province.

Finance Minister Dwight Duncan said the auditor general has been asked to conduct a review of the expense practices at the gaming agency including the approvals process.

"What we need is enhanced accountability," Duncan said at a news conference Monday. "I don't like this. I don't think the taxpayers like this. The challenge for us is that we put an end to it."

The development comes on the heel's of this summer's spending scandal at eHealth Ontario, where documents emerged showing the value of untendered consulting contracts - some of them to friends and associates of senior agency officials - was in the tens of millions.

The taxpayer-owned OLG has been rocked by a series of embarrassing promotions, scandals and allegations of fraud over the past several years.

They included the case of Bob Edmonds, a Coboconk, Ont., man who was cheated out of a $250,000 prize by a convenience store clerk who kept the prize for herself.

The lottery company failed to act on Edmonds's complaint and he was ultimately forced to sue.

That case prompted an investigation by Ontario's ombudsman, who found OLG regularly turned a blind eye to fraudulent behaviour by its retailers. Between 1999 and 2007, the ombudsman found there had been 247 major lottery wins ranging between $50,000 and $12.5 million by lottery retailers, their employees and their families as well as OLG employees.

Early this spring, OLG released an audit showing it has paid out more than $198 million to insiders since 1995, roughly twice the amount the provincial ombudsman initially suspected.

The scandals prompted the exit of several high-level executives as well as the company's former CEO, Duncan Brown.

As well in March, the gaming operator said it regretted a decision to offer 22 foreign-built automobiles as prizes for a springtime promotion - which came as North American auto producers fought for their lives amid the worst economic downturn in decades.

On Monday afternoon the province will release thousands of pages of OLG-related expenses, pre-empting a request by the provincial Conservatives, who had filed a freedom of information request seeking documents related to expenses.