Commissioners lash out over game check system

Members of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission had harsh words recently with a vendor that botched the commission’s mobile smartphone app.

In 2022, the commission contracted with PayIt Outdoors to revamp what was previously a user-friendly interface. PayIt Outdoors screwed it up royally. Its reboot is decidedly not us- er-friendly, and it made about a lot of people really angry.

For example, on opening day of the statewide youth deer season, a friend contacted me desperately seeking advice on how to check a deer that his pre-adolescent son shot. The boy shot the deer in the afternoon. Unable to check the deer on the mobile app, he spent several hours trying to check the deer over the phone.

The child had killed deer before, but the new system did not recognize his customer ID number. Instead, the system required the kid to buy a hunting license, but children younger than age 16 are not required to buy licenses. My friend eventually hit the purchase button anyway, at which point the app identified the child as being an existing customer who was entitled to a free permit.

Because the app did not confirm the game check, my friend hit the “submit” button twice. He checked the same deer twice, but he was also logged as having checked two deer.

Despite a language barrier with the call representative, my friend checked the same deer a third time by phone.

I encountered a similar situation. While waiting for deer to arrive on opening morning of modern gun deer season, I fiddled with the new app trying to discern the game check feature. I declined to shoot a deer because I couldn’t figure out how to check it.

Eventually I discovered that I had to go to a page in the mobile app that lists all of my licenses. Clicking my license opened a page that contained all of my tags. For your first deer you click your first deer tag, and that takes you to the game check process.

It was easy once I figured it out. Figuring it out took half the morning.

Because so many hunters had so much difficulty checking deer, the commission will never know exactly how many deer hunters killed in Arkansas this season.

Spencer Griffith, a deputy director for the Game and Fish Commission, oversees the vendor and this process. He acknowledged that many deer were checked multiple times and that the same deer were checked multiple times under different categories. He said he can isolate duplicates and reduce them to a single game check for statistical purposes.

However, game wardens informally checked a lot of deer that were never logged into a database. These were last-ditch attempts by hunters to be legal when they exhausted all of their options online or by phone. Those kills are not recorded.

Hunters who couldn’t reach a game warden and who exhausted their patience with the online and phone systems gave up and processed their deer without checking them. Those kills are not recorded, either. Brad Young, the commission’s enforcement chief, said those hunters can’t be faulted for trying and failing to use a faulty game check system.

Naturally, angry hunters swamped the agency with phone calls throughout the season, and commissioners took a lot of those calls themselves. A problem that reaches commission level leads to some chewed posteriors. That was the subtext for the grilling that occurred between the seven members of the commission, Griffith, and two representatives from PayIt Outdoors.

One of the representatives acknowledged that there were things PayIt Outdoors “could have done better.”

“You said you could have done it better, so why didn’t you do it?” commission chairman Stan Jones asked angrily. That question unleashed a torrent of disdain from the other commissioners.

The representatives denied that any game check calls were diverted to overseas call centers. They said they employed non-native English speakers to engage a more diverse constituency. That’s inefficient considering that the overwhelming majority of hunters are English-first speakers. Add local dialects and vernacular and perhaps a bit of creative cursing, and you’ve got an insurmountable language barrier.

The vendor representatives said they would straighten it out before spring turkey season. We hope “straighten out” isn’t vernacular for “mess it up again.”