Oh Lottery, What a Lottery!

By: Keith Baxter

The Oh Lottery stands for the Ohio Lottery. Created in May of 1973, the first lottery ticket went on sale in August of 1974. The Lottery was started by a legislative voter referendum to try and raise money for the state's public education system. Today the lottery offers a variety of games from instant games, to online games. The lottery currently has 10 games including the ever-popular Mega Millions Jackpot. There are more than 8,800 licensed retailer locations across the state of Ohio. Profits from the lottery go directly to the state's education fund. More than $15.5 billion have gone to this fund since the lottery started. This makes up about 4.5 percent of the state's funding needed for public education.

The Oh Lottery has 8 values they operate by:

1. Honor and maintain their efforts to provide funding for public education for the state of Ohio.
2. Abide by all legal and ethical standards of the state of Ohio.
3. Always keep the publics trust and be worthy of their respect.
4. Only offer games that are fair and have quality prizes with real value.
5. Protect the integrity of lottery employees, retailers, and players.
6. Always evaluate and improve operation efficiency.
7. Promote the lottery to all citizens of the state of Ohio.
8. Evaluate retailers only on the number of the population it serves and not the revenue it brings in.

To go along with these values, the Oh Lottery has also come up with three goals they follow. The first is that they must meet or exceed all of their commitments they have made to the education fund. This is the whole reason they started the lottery to begin with. To help with this, they would like to increase revenue by doing product research, design, development, and support. They would also like to try to decrease expenses by looking at their current efficiencies.

The second goal is to achieve excellence on all their principles. This would include improving service to all of their customers and vendors, improve efficiencies of prize processing, improve organization's accountability and productivity, and enhancing the exchange and streaming of lottery processes.

The third goal is to partner up with the state of Ohio's Attorney General to increase the accountability of charitable gaming throughout the state. Their objectives to achieve this goal are to establish gaming applications, licensing, and renewal processes. They would also conduct extensive site inspections on their gaming processes.

The Oh Lottery currently employs 333 people. It carries its own branch in the state government. All of its directors report to the governor of Ohio. All of the lottery's budget approvals go through the Office of Budget and Management, and the Ohio General Assembly.