DIA Operational Update - 6 August 2021
6 August 2021
Class 4 Grants: Data Collection and reporting
The Department is now developing a centralised data base to capture all information on Class 4 grants distribution. We are working with KPMG on this project, and over the next week KPMG will approach your society directly to request your society’s grants data for the period 1 January 2020 to 30 June 2021. KPMG will also produce a report on the grant data which will be released by DIA (as was done for the 2019 year).
Why are we doing this?
One of our Gambling strategic priorities is to ensure we balance managing the integrity of the system, with minimising harm and improving community benefit. One of the first initiatives is to provide more open and transparent data for communities.
Some of the benefits will be to:
- provide an accurate and transparent sector-wide view of grant activities across New Zealand
- allow comparison of class 4 spending (GMP) in communities against grants returned to those communities
By improving the grants data base, there will be a clearer picture of community benefit from grant funding and potential to assess impacts of this on community wellbeing.
What does this mean for you?
KPMG will approach your society directly to request grant data for the period 1 January 2020 to 30 June 2021. KPMG will provide a detailed overview and guidance on the changes and information requested when it sends out the data collection sheet.
The KPMG spreadsheet will be very familiar to you as Class 4 societies have in the past provided this information to KPMG on behalf of GMANZ. We are not asking for any additional information than in the previous collection, but we have made a small number of grant category changes. However, this should ultimately make it easier for you to classify grants consistently.
After this collection phase, collection will be undertaken every 6 months.
Gambling Commission's Matata recommendations
This is an update on the Department’s response to the Gambling Commission’s recommendations in the Matatā Hotel decision, following our email of 20 May 2021.
In that decision, the Commission recommended that the Department give societies that operate fewer EGMs than their permitted venue maximums an opportunity to add the details of additional EGMs to their licence (even though they may not operate those machines).
As you may know, we recently returned applications to add inactive EGMs to venue licences. Until the Department considers and resolves the practicalities and impacts of the recommendation, we are unable to implement the Commission’s recommendation.
There are significant impacts of the recommendation that mean we cannot implement it immediately, such as IT infrastructure to enable the changes, and impacts of the Gambling (Fees) Regulations 2015.
We are working towards a long-term solution that gives societies greater freedom to manage the movement of their EGMs in a manner envisaged by the Gambling Commission recommendations, and we are actively developing and considering some interim solutions to allow this to occur, while working on the longer term infrastructure and regulation solutions.
We will continue to keep the class 4 sector informed.
Update on monthly EMS monitoring charges
You may have noticed that July’s EMS invoices were not direct debited from Societies or Clubs bank accounts on July 20 as expected. This is due to the outage and upgrade of our finance system that we advised about in the last Gambits. Instead July’s and August’s invoices will be direct debited on 20 August 2021.
(SOURCE: Department of Internal Affairs, Emailed 6th August 2021)
