Montana's Lottery Books Were Off by $18.5M, Audit Finds
Summary
Montana's Legislative Audit Division could not express an opinion on the Montana State Lottery's fiscal 2024 financial statements -- a disclaimer of opinion, the audit's most serious possible outcome -- after the fund's longtime financial-services director died in spring 2025 with no one trained to take over her work. Auditors found $18.5 million in accumulated misstatements across cash, receivable, liability, and prize-expense accounts, and all five of the fund's legally required quarterly payments to the state General Fund and the Montana STEM Scholarship account arrived late, by 72 to 131 days. That misstatement total is more than eight times the $2.25 million the lottery actually paid into STEM scholarships all year.
Why the auditor wouldn't sign
A disclaimer of opinion means the audit division could not gather enough evidence to say whether the lottery's financial statements were accurate -- not that it found them wrong, but that it couldn't tell. The immediate cause was a missing signature⧉: lottery management could not provide the written representations auditors are required to obtain before closing an audit, the standard step where an agency's leadership formally takes responsibility for its own numbers, including that its records are complete and accurate. Auditing standards let an auditor withdraw from an engagement when management won't provide those representations; state law requires the Legislative Audit Division to audit the lottery regardless, so it disclaimed an opinion instead.
One employee, then no one
The scope limitation traces to a staffing gap. One employee -- the lottery's longtime financial services director -- was primarily responsible for recording lottery game activity and preparing its financial statements. The lottery had not documented her procedures⧉, updated her controls, or cross-trained anyone else to do the work. She died in spring 2025, and the lottery could not complete or support its fiscal 2024 statements without her; they were only partially finished before her death and weren't handed to auditors until October 2025 -- about sixteen months after the fiscal year they covered had ended. Reviewing the state's broader fiscal 2025 financial statements, auditors also traced systemic recording errors, dating back several years, to two lottery games launched in fiscal years 2019 and 2021 -- games only she had been recording.
View data as table
| Receivable | $7.0M overstated (37.8%) |
|---|---|
| Cash/Cash Equivalents | $4.7M understated (25.4%) |
| Liability (due to other fund) | $2.3M overstated (12.4%) |
| Transfers-Out | $2.3M overstated (12.4%) |
| Lottery Prize Expense | $1.6M overstated (8.6%) |
| Contracted Services | $0.6M understated (3.2%) |
| TOTAL misstatement | $18.5M (100.0%) |
A second control gap, layered on top
The audit also found that three of the lottery's five accounting staff⧉ held a privileged system role letting them both record and approve their own journal entries, without independent review -- the opposite of the segregation of duties state accounting policy calls for. Separately, the lottery fell behind on checking data from its main outside game-services vendor, Intralot: it was supposed to complete four quarterly reviews of that vendor's financial data in fiscal 2024, but finished only one on schedule, with the other three not done until late February 2025.
The transfers the state was owed
Montana law (23-7-402, MCA⧉) requires the lottery to move its net revenue to the state every quarter: the first $2.25 million of each fiscal year's net revenue, in four equal $562,500 payments, to the Montana STEM Scholarship program (administered by the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education, or OCHE), and everything above that to the state General Fund. Because the lottery had already missed its fiscal 2023 third-quarter transfer, it owed the state five payments in fiscal 2024 instead of the usual four⧉ -- and every one of them arrived late, from 72 days late for the $6,930,859 first-quarter payment to 131 days late for the $7,098,797 second-quarter General Fund payment. Missing the fiscal 2023 payment before that fiscal year closed had already left both the lottery's cash and its transfer-liability balance about $5.4 million higher than they should have been.
View data as table
| FY2023 Q3 | 123 days late -- $4,819,728 |
|---|---|
| FY2023 Q4 | 81 days late -- $4,559,272 |
| FY2024 Q1 | 72 days late -- $6,930,859 |
| FY2024 Q2 (STEM/OCHE) | 87 days late -- $562,500 |
| FY2024 Q2 (General Fund) | 131 days late -- $7,098,797 |
What the lottery has agreed to do
The audit issued a single recommendation, which lottery management said it would follow: understand the data its vendor supplies well enough to record it accurately, limit which staff can both enter and approve transactions, get outside help or training on financial reporting, and make sure the institutional knowledge needed to vouch for the numbers doesn't live in one employee again. The division counted two material weaknesses and one significant deficiency⧉ in the lottery's internal controls, and zero instances of material non-compliance with law. The report is dated May 19, 2026 -- nearly two years after the fiscal year it covers ended. Whether the disclaimer clears will depend on what the division's next audit of the lottery finds.
- A disclaimer of opinion. Auditors could not determine whether the Montana Lottery's FY2024 financial statements were accurate -- not that they found them wrong, but that lottery management couldn't provide the assurances needed to check.
- $18.5 million in accumulated misstatements across cash, receivable, liability, and prize-expense accounts, by this outlet's sum of the audit's own Table 2 figures.
- All five required quarterly transfers arrived late -- worth $23,971,156 combined -- averaging nearly 99 days after each deadline, with the worst payment 131 days late.
- The scope limitation traces to one employee's death and years without a documented, cross-trained backup for her financial-reporting work.
The $18.5 million total, the receivable's share of it, the 8.2x comparison to the STEM Scholarship transfer, the $23,971,156 transfer sum, and the 98.8-day average delay are this outlet's own arithmetic on the audit's reported figures (method in this piece's underlying data), cross-checked where possible against the lottery's own Statement of Cash Flows. The report documents accounting misstatements and internal-control weaknesses; it does not allege fraud in any section reviewed for this piece.
Sources(2) ▾
- Montana Legislative Audit Division, Financial Audit: Montana State Lottery, For the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2024 (Report 24-30) (2026-06-01) — The financial audit report itself -- source for the disclaimer of opinion and its basis (pp. A-1 to A-2), the $18.5 million in accumulated account misstatements (Table 2, p. 6), the five FY2024-related quarterly transfers and how many days late each arrived (Table 1, p. 2), the $5.4 million cash/liability overstatement from the missed FY2023 third-quarter transfer (p. 3), the loss of the lottery's longtime financial services director and the resulting reporting delay (p. 2), the two lottery games with systemic recording errors (p. 5), the segregation-of-duties and Intralot service-organization findings (pp. 6-7), the single Recommendation #1 and lottery's concurrence (p. S-2), the material-weakness/significant-deficiency counts (p. S-2), and the lottery's own unaudited FY2024 financial statements (Statement of Net Position and Statement of Revenues, Expenses and Changes in Net Position, pp. A-4 to A-5). static.legmt.gov · original document
- Montana Code Annotated, Montana Legislature, 23-7-402, MCA -- Disposition of Revenue (Montana State Lottery) (2019-05-02) — The statute requiring quarterly transfers of lottery net revenue -- source for the requirement that the first $2.25 million of each fiscal year's net revenue be transferred in four equal $562,500 quarterly payments to the Montana STEM scholarship program special revenue account, with net revenue above $2.25 million transferred to the state general fund. mca.legmt.gov · original document
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Montana's Legislative Audit Division⧉ could not express an opinion on the Montana State Lottery's financial statements for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2024 -- a disclaimer of opinion, the most serious outcome a financial audit can reach short of finding the statements outright unreliable. Auditors identified $18.5 million in accumulated misstatements across the lottery's cash, receivable, liability, and prize-expense accounts, and found that all five of the fund's legally required quarterly transfers to the state General Fund and the Montana STEM Scholarship account -- money the lottery must move within weeks of each quarter's end -- arrived between 72 and 131 days late.