It is welcome news that the military junta has stepped in to tackle overpriced lottery tickets — a longstanding problem rooted in cronyism, monopoly and corruption.
NCPO head Gen Prayuth Chan-ocha has ordered the retail price of lottery tickets to be capped at 80 baht apiece. A special panel headed by an army general and a new board of the Government Lottery Office (GLO) led by Somchai Sajjapongse, director-general of the Customs Department, are responsible for cleaning up house and getting the price-capping job done.
Originally, the junta wanted the price cap to be effective from Tuesday's lottery draw. But many small-time lottery vendors had already bought the tickets from their dealers at higher prices, so the deadline was postponed to the July 16 draw.
Besides this sensible decision, however, the efforts by the army-led panel to solve the overpricing problem so far have been disappointing. The request for cooperation from the handful of monopolistic wholesalers and big-time dealers to keep the retail price at 80 baht apiece and the establishment of a makeshift pavilion in front of the GLO head office in Nonthaburi to sell lottery tickets amount to just scratching the surface of the problem.
For starters, no buyers will travel a long distance to buy just a few tickets for 80 baht apiece in Nonthaburi. Nor will the wholesalers and big-time dealers be willing to throw away their easily earned profits.
There is no need for the new board or the army-led panel to commission a new study on how to solve the overpricing problem. There are already many proposals to break the monopoly, but these have been ignored by successive governments. The GLO gives 14 billion baht to the government each year and it is suspected that state inaction is due to an under-the-table arrangement.
The lottery problem must be tackled at its root cause — the GLO’s quota system that favours three wholesalers who have been allocated a substantial portion of tickets for each draw. The tickets are then sold to dealers at a profit and resold to sub-dealers, also at a profit until they finally reach the hands of small-time vendors whose real cost per ticket is already higher than the 80-baht capped price.
Kuntheera Tantirungsi, the acting GLO director, recently disclosed that the tickets are sold by the GLO to the wholesalers, charitable foundations and provincial administrations which altogether form the first tier of the distribution system at 74.40 baht per ticket. The tickets are then sold to dealers who form the second tier of the distribution system at 82-84 baht apiece, which is already higher than the capped price.
Sangsit Piriyarangsan, dean of the College of Social Innovation at Rangsit University and an expert on gambling in Thailand, has pointed out that the GLO system of renewing contracts with wholesalers every year has given politicians opportunities to squeeze “tea money” in exchange for contract renewals. Hence the reluctance of all previous governments to touch the GLO’s quota system.
The quota system needs to be completely overhauled. There is a need for a fair and transparent lottery allocation system so small vendors will have direct access to lottery tickets at less than the 80-baht capped price. The GLO must take a financial risk when lottery tickets for each draw are not completely sold out.
Tackling overpriced lottery tickets is long overdue, and it will test whether the NCPO has the moral courage to address the root problem that every administration for the past several decades has shunned.