Colorado’s Gambling Addiction Program a bust

Audit slams counseling efforts, in which 9,000 people asked for help but not one received assistance.

In Colorado, where gambling addiction ranks higher than the national average, more than 9,000 people called a national hotline in 2014 seeking help.

The same year, a state program that provides money for counseling problem gamblers didn’t assist a single person.

Of the 23 counselors who received state money to get national accreditation in gambling addiction in the past two years, only five obtained the certification.

Instead of providing services, 83 percent of the money in the 2015 fiscal year went to administrative and marketing expenses incurred by the state and the contractor hired to run the program.

The blatant failures in the state’s Gambling Addiction Program — revealed in a new audit — drew the ire of Colorado lawmakers Tuesday and again put Gov. John Hickenlooper’s administration on the defensive.

“Something is wrong with the program,” said former state Sen. Jeanne Nicholson, a Black Hawk Democrat who requested the au-

dit. “The purpose was to help people who had gaming addictions that were associated with us legalizing gaming in Colorado. And I don’t think we are accomplishing that.”

State Sen. Tim Neville, R-Littleton, called it the ultimate “government program that was designed to supposedly help people” that didn’t work.

Even though the program is relatively small — $100,000 a year in taxes, fees and fines paid by casinos — it received outsized attention because it further highlights management concerns in the troubled Department of Human Services, where Executive Director Reggie Bicha is facing intense scrutiny.

In a letter to the governor this year, lawmakers expressed their displeasure with Bicha’s leadership and frustration about a litany of issues within the human services agency.

In the months since, little has improved, Neville said, and more problems are surfacing.

The audit’s findings are “reflective of what I would call a cultural issue within DHS that needs to be addressed,” Neville said. “At the end of the day, the buck stops in the governor’s office.”

At the hearing, Bicha said his agency will implement all the auditor’s recommendations and cut ties with the Center for Governmental Training, the contractor that administers the program.

“I am beyond disappointed in the results of this particular audit,” Bicha told lawmakers. “And extraordinarily discouraged by the work of our Office of Behavioral Health in implementing this program.”

Although he cautioned he was not making excuses, Bicha noted that his agency received less than $5,000 to administer the program. He acknowledged that department leaders “have not given it the attention and focus that people who are struggling with gambling addictions need.”

State Rep. Dianne Primavera, a Broomfield Democrat who sponsored the legislation to create the program, said the state needs to take the issue more seriously.

“Gambling addiction is one of the worst addictions you can have because it leads to crime and job loss and people’s houses going into foreclosure and domestic violence and drinking and other kinds of addictions,” she told Bicha at the hearing. “This isn’t the kind of addiction that we should brush aside.”

The agency has contracted with two entities since its inception.

Starting in the 2011 fiscal year, the program paid the University of Denver about $65,500 a year to allow psychology students to provide counseling services, the audit found, an arrangement that didn’t meet standards set in state law.

DU students counseled 116 people in three years, but the university didn’t offer counselors scholarships to receive national accreditation.

When the Center for Governmental Training took over the program in September 2013, the focus appeared to shift to accrediting counselors. Still, the state spent $21,000 to train 17 counselors who were ineligible for certification, the audit found.

Only one person received help through a counselor for gambling addiction in 2014 and 2015 — a move that came this year after auditors began asking questions.

Joe Sprague, the center’s director and a longtime state contractor, did not return messages Tuesday.

In response to the audit, Bicha put new rules governing the program into place.

But auditors said the rules still lack clarity and may still hamper the program.

As part of the same report, state auditors also found serious issues with a Department of Local Affairs program that awarded $4.9 million in 2014 to local governments to offset the impacts of gaming.

The agency and its advisory committee — which new agency director Irv Halter pledged to fix — allocated hundreds of thousands of dollars without verifying gaming impacts and violated the state’s open meetings law, the report said.

State auditors discovered a similar problem 15 years ago but the latest report made clear that DOLA officials never made the necessary fixes.