Ontario’s auditor general hired “mystery shoppers” to attend casinos under cover, spending thousands of dollars with the primary goal of testing money laundering protections at casinos.
Ontario’s premiere Doug Ford responded saying the auditor general should “stay in her lane” after her stint of hiring undercover agents to test casinos’ money laundering protections.
Bonnie Lysyk claims she hired mystery shoppers who were able to get cheques from casinos in a way that confirmed they could in fact launder money. An important detail though, is that these shoppers were ultimately caught by security in their attempts to launder their money.
Doug Ford has claimed that Lysyk should focus on value-for-money audits rather than focusing her energy on these sting operations.
Lysyk took her time responding to this comment.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford continued saying he welcomes audits that locate where his Provincial government wastes money.
“The auditor general has to stay in her lane and focus on where there’s a waste of money,” Ford said while giving a news conference on Thursday.
“You can’t do a sting operation, you can’t all of a sudden deputize yourself and think you’re the secret service going around doing sting operations; that failed by the way and they were caught.”
A very direct response from Doug Ford who is known to be outspoken and no stranger to making headlines.
Mystery Shoppers Part of Auditor General Probe
In the report that was manufactured by the auditor general herself, Lysyk claimed that her office had contracted mystery shoppers from a consultant agency in order to carry out their tests on money laundering protections at four different casinos.
“The purpose of the mystery shopper assignment was to test whether the casinos verified the mystery shoppers’ play and casino wins before issuing cheques of $3,000 or more,” Lysyk said in her detailed report.
Lysyk claimed that at two casinos the undercover agents walked in with cash ranging from $5,000 to $11,000.
With limited play and no proof of actual winnings, auditor general Lysyk said the undercover shoppers were then able to cash out with cheques issued from the casino for $4,900 and $10,600 respectively.
“These funds could be considered to be ‘laundered’ because the cheques issued to the agents could now be claimed as casino winnings and deposited at a bank” essentially laundering the funds successfully, Lysyk wrote.
It was admitted by Lysyk, the auditor general that the Ontario Provincial Police were not one bit pleased with the sting operation conducted by herself and her agents, ultimately asking her to stop because it took up their resources in order to carry out such an operation.
Lysyk continued to defend her position with regards to the ‘sting’ operation, and made the following remarks in her defense:
“We do believe it was a worthwhile exercise to revisit the internal controls that are communicated to the casino operators, who are big casino operators in Ontario, of how to ensure that they restrict as much as they can money laundering from happening in the casinos in Ontario,” she said.
The auditor general taking her own initiatives in order to find flaws in the money laundering protection in casinos can cause divided opinions, as you can easily view her actions as either noble or on the flip side, a power-trip move resulting in a waste of resources.
There’s no debate that this stint has shown us something, some vulnerabilities at the very least in our Casinos and their protections against money laundering. On the other side, the statement by Ford is also an understandable one, as Ontario has its own regulatory board that’s in charge of these things, and the auditor general probably should not be stepping outside of her domain with regards to responsibilities and using the province’s resources at her own disposal.