State Lottery Still Spending Thousands on Travel

Arkansas Lottery

Since last July, the Arkansas Lottery has spent more than $151,000 reimbursing employees for their travel mileage, according to the Arkansas Transparency website.

That’s up about $8,000 since April 1 of this year.

We’ve written repeatedly about how the Arkansas Lottery reimburses its employees for travel across the state instead of using Department of Finance vehicles, which are cheaper.

When state employees use their personal vehicles for work-related travel, they can be reimbursed 42 cents for every mile they drive.

In light of that, it appears Arkansas Lottery employees have driven their personal vehicles nearly 360,000 miles on official, Lottery business since July 1, 2019.

It may seem odd to some people that Arkansas Lottery employees have continued to to receive reimbursements for travel mileage amid a statewide pandemic.

Spending six figures on mileage reimbursement is just another example of wasteful spending at the Arkansas Lottery.

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Lottery Scholarship Funding Low Despite High Sales: March Report

Arkansas Lottery

Last week the Arkansas Lottery released its report for the month of March.

The report shows the Arkansas Lottery took in nearly $47.9 million — the highest revenue of any month since March of last year.

Despite selling so many lottery tickets, Arkansas’ college students received less than $7.4 million last month — about 15 cents out of every dollar the Arkansas Lottery made.

More than $33 million went to prizes for lottery players.

As we have said time and time again, the Arkansas Lottery does not make scholarship funding a priority. If it did, Arkansas’ college students would get more than 15% – 16% of the Lottery’s revenue.

Below is a breakdown of Lottery revenue and scholarship funding so far this fiscal year.

Month Gross Lottery Revenue Paid to Scholarships % Gross Revenue
July $41,239,173.79 $4,523,930.75 11.0%
August 40,899,086.75 4,942,736.97 12.1%
September 36,202,677.79 6,565,973.32 18.1%
October 38,932,640.23 6,318,099.21 16.2%
November 36,118,641.12 5,947,177.45 16.5%
December 46,134,469.21 6,371,983.49 13.8%
January, 2020 40,802,067.75 8,239,083.77 20.2%
February 40,670,746.71 7,233,556.77 17.8%
March 47,876,969.85 7,386,497.30 15.4%
Total $368,876,473.20 $57,529,039.03 15.6%

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Updated: Arkansas Lottery Still Spending Thousands On Employees’ Mileage

Arkansas Lottery

As we have written time and again, the Arkansas Lottery takes in millions of dollars every month, but it pays only a fraction of its revenue to scholarships.

Most of the money goes to prizes.

Among other things, the Arkansas Lottery spends a lot of money on its operational expenses — especially travel.

We’ve written before about how the Arkansas Lottery reimburses its employees for travel across the state instead of using Department of Finance vehicles, which are cheaper.

Since July 1, 2019, the Arkansas Lottery Office has spent more than $143,000 on mileage reimbursements.

One employee alone, according to the state’s website, has been reimbursed more than $10,000 for mileage.

Considering that state employees receive 42 cents for every mile they travel on state business in their personal vehicles, $10,000 would be enough money to drive nearly 24,000 miles!

All told, mileage reimbursements appear to be the Arkansas Lottery’s eighth highest operational expense.

There are plenty of ways the Arkansas Lottery could cut costs and provide more money for college scholarships.

Unfortunately, that’s something the Lottery Office doesn’t seem interested in doing.

Photo Credit: Airtuna08 at English Wikipedia [CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)]

Updated: 4/1/2020 to reflect the latest mileage reimbursements.

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