INDIANAPOLIS – The Hoosier Lottery has now placed recent bids to privatize certain functions online, and is working to reduce the amount of information redacted in the information from the winning company.
The move came after The Journal Gazette reported Wednesday that huge portions of the two bids were blank or shielded from public view, and that the documents were not available to citizens online.
The final agreement between the Hoosier Lottery and GTECH Indiana, LLC – which won the contract – also has not been made public.
In the previous story, Gov. Mitch Daniels said he would talk to the lottery about making as much information public as possible.
A release from the lottery Friday said the bid responses are now online atwww.hoosierlottery.com/about-us/bids/public-records.
Both bidders – GTECH and Scientific Games — identified significant portions of their submissions as proprietary and sought to protect them during the course of the competitive bid process, or deemed them to be company trade secrets, the release said.
“Now that the contract has been awarded, the Hoosier Lottery is working with GTECH to update and minimize its prior redactions to provide open access to as much of GTECH’s response as is permitted by law,” lottery officials said. “It is anticipated that this effort will result in an updated copy of GTECH’s RFI response being made available to the public no later than Wednesday, Oct. 31.”
The final services agreement also is being reviewed and will be available as soon as possible.
Earlier this month, the state lottery commission voted to hire GTECH to assume day-to-day administration of the Hoosier Lottery’s marketing, sales, distribution and customer service operations effective in February.
GTECH promised the state $1.76 billion during the first five years of the contract. The company earns bonuses if the annual targets are met and must pay the state if they aren’t.
The Hoosier Lottery brought in about $227 million for the fiscal year ended June 30, and expects to generate about the same amount next year.
GTECH’s target for fiscal year 2014 is $256 million, and the number rises to $410 million in 2018.
The five-member lottery commission will still maintain control over all significant business decisions and will have the authority to approve GTECH’s annual business plan each year before it can be implemented.
That business plan was a large part of the bid, and was mostly unreadable in the redacted documents.
nkelly@jg.net
Video of redacted documents
To see a story and video about the redacted documents, click on this URL —
http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20121017/NEWS07/310179965
