NAO raps Government monitoring of Camelot

The Government failed to monitor adequately the activities of lottery company Camelot in the first year of its operation, according to the National Audit Office. In some cases, the Government watchdog Oflot relied instead on reports provided by Camelot and its auditors Price Waterhouse for confirmation that the scheme was running smoothly. The NAO concluded in a report published last week that Camelot appeared to comply with the requirement that it should accurately calculate the weekly lottery total cash prize and effectively distribute the funds to players. But the report regretted that both the director general of Oflot and the NAO had been refused access to Camelot’s books to verify the compliance procedures in place at the company. ‘The director general … did not have any information on the detailed work and testing on which the Price Waterhouse opinion was based,’ the agency said.

It confirmed that most compliance issues had been addressed by Oflot by the time it completed its report, though it was still concerned that Oflot had failed to carry out a formal risk analysis of Camelot’s computer systems a year after the network went live.