By William Selmah, wselmah@gmail.com
The last three audit reports released by Liberia’s supreme audit institution in Liberia (GAC) has exonerated Doxxbet Liberia of fraud, contrary to allegations by the National Lottery Association (NLA) several months ago that the betting company was defrauding the Liberian government through its operations.
The GAC is the General Auditing Commission of Liberia.
It can be recalled that the NLA Deputy Director General for Operations, Neved P. Kortu, and his Special Assistant took to the media in late May of this year and accused the company of operating more slot machines than authorized, thereby allegedly duping government of hundreds of thousands of US dollars.
They claimed further that Doxxbet had denied NLA inspectors access to their premises.
A review of audit reports of the General Auditing Commission (GAC) – Liberia’s supreme auditing agency of the activities of the institution clothed with the authority to regulate all games of chances such as raffle draws, casinos, slot machine, etc, therefore became a viable option in completing this story.
But reports of audits the GAC conducted of the operations of the NLA covering the last three audit periods (2017, 2018 and 2019) did not mention Doxxbet Liberia among companies operating games of chance involved in frauds and other malpractices.
Instead, the findings covering the three year periodare replete with the GAC pinpointing financial irregularities and procedural errors of the NLA, among them granting of licenses to some companies without the Board’s approval as provided for in the NLA regulations; making payments to employees that don’t exist and making paymentsamounting to hundreds of thousands U.S. dollars to employees rather than service providers for services rendered the NLA.
Another segment highlighted that “official payment receipts issued to Lottery Companies for payment of operation license fees could not be reconciled to the amount reported in the NLA designated Guaranty Trust bank account.”
“We also noted that the NLA Management did not maintain a cash receipt ledger and/or invoices for payments made to the entity for operation license fees findings of the audit revealed.”
The allegations made against Doxxbet by the NLA Deputy Director for Operations and his Special Assistant, came as negotiations between Doxxbet and the Liberia Football Association (LFA) on the possible signing of a US$24,000.00 deal for individual’s awards were well advanced.
The deal was sealed in the following months, marking the first time in the history of the country’s FA, that most outstanding athletes received cash awards at the close of the domestic leagues in both the male and female categories.
Skeptics have been questioning why the NLA could choose to go the media to attack Doxxbet instead of addressing themselves the countless indictments against them in the audit reports, one of which centers on the NLA paying more than US$400,000 in salaries to ghost employees.