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Legislative audit finds Minnesota State Lottery lacks adequate internal controls and inconsistent retailer background checks
Summary
The Office of the Legislative Auditor reported that the Minnesota State Lottery "generally did not have adequate internal controls," citing insufficient IT access reviews, untested incident-response plans, retailer background-check gaps and expired retailer contracts allowed to continue selling tickets.
The Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA) told the Minnesota House State Government Finance Committee on Jan. 16, 2025 that its November performance audit of the Minnesota State Lottery found weaknesses in both IT controls and retail oversight that increase risk to the lottery's gaming operations.
"We found the lottery generally did not have adequate internal controls," Lori Lisen, deputy legislative auditor for the financial audit division, told the committee. The audit reviewed lottery operations and IT from July 1, 2021 through Dec. 31, 2023 and combined non-IT and IT testing to examine core gaming systems, retailer controls and prior audit-findings status.
Lisen said the audit identified three principal IT weaknesses: the lottery had not performed annual reviews of all system access as required by its policies; key IT administrators lacked adequate separation of duties; and the lottery had not fully documented, approved or tested incident-response and disaster-recovery procedures. Regarding access controls, Lisen said lottery staff currently hold broad administrative privileges across monitoring systems and servers,…
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