Nevada lawmakers say they will consider a new bill to tap large casino jackpots for any winners’ delinquent child support in the next legislative session, to begin in January 2023, after failing to agree on the details of proposed legislation last year.
So-called “jackpot-intercept” laws are in force currently in states like Massachusetts, which runs winner information such as Social Security numbers and names for any jackpot of more than $1,200 on slots or $5,000 on tables through a database to identify winners who have delinquent state taxes or delinquent child support payments. Nevada lawmakers passed a bill, Assembly Bill 406, last year that would support tapping jackpots to pay delinquent child support, but left the details for the 2023 session.
“The Nevada Child Support Enforcement Program has over 83,500 open child support cases,” said Cathy Kaplan, chief of the Nevada Child Support Enforcement Program for the Division of Welfare and Supportive Services, Department of Health and Human Services, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“Of those cases, there are over 68,000 obligors who are in arrears with their child support obligations,” she said. “Existing statute allows past-due support to be withheld when an obligor wins a prize or lottery. However, there are no current processes for licensed gaming establishments to identify delinquent obligors and withhold from their gambling winnings.”
The Nevada Resort Association (NRA) was one of the stakeholders expressing concern last year with AB406.
“Our concerns with AB406 as initially drafted were centered on details and logistics rather than the concept,” NRA President and CEO Virginia Valentine told the Review-Journal. “Due to the size and complexity of Nevada’s gaming industry as compared to states with far fewer licensees, a reasonable first step would be for the state to develop a reliable and secure IT system or database and ensure it works as intended with adequate data privacy protections before mandating an untested system… This is a significant undertaking that must be done properly from the beginning.”
Former Nevada Gaming Control Board Chairwoman Becky Harris, now a distinguished fellow in gaming at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told the News Journal more research needs to be done ahead of addressing the details of a new program.
“We haven’t done a study to see who’s actually winning our jackpots,” said Harris, a former state senator. “We are an international destination. That’s not to say that in Massachusetts they don’t have international visitation, but you can’t even compare Massachusetts to Nevada because they have three licensees, and when you look across restricted and non-restricted (licenses in Nevada), we’re at almost 3,000.”
