'Show us the money,' outraged punter tells NZ Lotteries

Eighty-year-old retired airline pilot Robin McGrath is taking New Zealand Lotteries to task for withholding tens of millions of prizemoney from successful punters.

Mr McGrath told NBR ONLINE it is “outrageous that Lotteries is sitting on $75 million of unclaimed prizemoney” – a sum, he says, which is growing by $10 million a year.

 What angers the Aucklander is the commission’s seeming inability to return most of the money to those who are entitled to it.

“It’s always bugged me that Lotto are withholding so much money from the rightful winners.

“In most raffles and the like you have the opportunity of putting your name and address against a ticket so even if you lose the ticket you can still get the prize.”

Mr McGrath believes New Zealand Lotteries should copy Australian lotteries where, for a small fee, punters can register their name and address against their tickets.

In the event of a win a cheque is automatically mailed to them and there is no need for them to produce the ticket.

“I believe what they have in Australia is the more honest type of system.

“New Zealand Lotteries are not being fair – the technology has been available for a long, long time and it should have been offered to New Zealanders.

“They are swimming in money but they've done nothing to fulfil their duty to ensure as many of those winners as possible receive their money. 

“It surprises me that the minister of internal affairs hasn’t looked at this and made it compulsory long ago,” he says.

New Zealand Lotteries has conceded to NBR ONLINE that it is sitting on a considerable sum of unclaimed prizemoney but disputes that it amounts to $75 million.

Spokeswoman Karen Jones says the figure quoted by Mr McGrath was a cumulative amount for the seven years from 2005 and was, in fact, tracking down from a high of $14.3 million in 2008-09 to $10.5 million in 2011-12.

She says NZ Lotteries prize reserve fund, which includes money from unclaimed prizes when the tickets have expired as well as “a small proportion of the sales of lottery games,” stands at $48.010 million.

“Approximately 2% of lottery prizes are unclaimed in any year. However, these are usually of a low value.

“It is very unusual to have a high-tier prize unclaimed over a year.

“The prize reserve fund is used to fund special prizes and top up jackpot amounts if necessary.

“It also funds additional promotional prizes for customers and is not used for any purpose other than prizes for customers.”

Ms Jones says the fund can fluctuate significantly during the year as prizes are paid out. But the balance must be big enough to cover the commission against the risk of a run of first division wins on Powerball and Big Wednesday “early on in their jackpot cycle”.

She says NZ Lotteries also goes to great lengths to publicise unclaimed large prizes before they expire after the one-year claim period.

“We will work with our local Lotto retailer to publicise unclaimed prizes in-store to customers and will contact local media to try and generate interest in the story.

“For instance, we were recently successful at tracking down a missing Winning Wheel winner in Auckland, matching the ticket purchase with Eftpos transactions via our computer records, and with the help of the bank we found the winner.”

All of which may go a little way to placating Robin McGrath – but certainly not on one crucial issue.

Ms Jones says the commission has “no plans at this stage” to introduce an in-store registration programme which he believes is long overdue.

For the moment, the only solution for people like Mr McGrath is to buy their tickets online where they are automatically notified of a win.

However, he can take heart from the fact that other countries also have problems with unclaimed prizes.

In the 17 years the national lottery has been running in Britain a total of $2.2 billion of prizemoney has remained unclaimed.

Of this, the biggest unclaimed prize was almost $20 million from a winning ticket bought in Doncaster seven years ago.

But even this pales into insignificance when compared with an unclaimed $97 million winning powerball ticket in the US last year.