Loto-Québec Implements a New Ticket Validation Procedure
at All of Its Points of Sale Equipped with Game Terminals

Montréal, January 14, 2008 – Effective today, Loto-Québec retailers operating game terminals must apply a new procedure for validating lottery tickets. In so doing, each ticket, whether it is a winner or not, must be returned to the customer along with the validation slip. In implementing the new procedure, the Corporation is responding to the recommendations issued last fall by the consulting firm of KPMG.

While retailers held on to paid out tickets in the past, they must now turn them over to their customers with the validation slip (a “customer copy” henceforth issued by the terminal). For their part, merchants will retain a “retailer copy” for their records. As in the past, retailers will continue to pay out prizes to customers within Loto-Québec's authorized payout limits, and they will tear the barcodes of paid out tickets.

Returning tickets and validation slips is advantageous for both consumers and retailers alike. By doing so, retailers are applying secure business practices that protect them and their customers from any confusion. From the consumer’s standpoint, recovering tickets and validation slips enables them to confirm the message already appearing on the terminal’s customer display and the musical tone emitted by the terminal to indicate a prize-winning ticket.

With the validation slip and ticket in hand (which they should have previously endorsed), consumers can more readily ascertain for themselves whether or not they have won a prize and, if applicable, the amount of the prize they have won. In the event that a winning ticket that has already been paid out is attempted to be validated a second time, the terminal will issue a slip bearing the message, “Déjà payé (“Already paid”), as is the case presently.

Adopted by other Canadian lottery corporations, this new validation procedure was one of the principal means of improvement suggested in the report released by KPGM, which received the mandate from Loto-Québec in April 2007 to examine the Corporation’s prize payment processes and procedures. Having committed to implementing all of the report’s recommendations as soon as possible, Loto-Québec is proceeding with this initiative in 2008, dedicated to sparing no effort to maintain the public confidence it has successfully sustained over the past 37 years.

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Information: 

Jean-Pierre Roy
Media Relations Department
Loto-Québec
514 499-5151

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