Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 17 April 2024
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Harness Racing: Irish Harness Racing Association
Mr. Gunner LaCour:
The tote system is parimutuel, which means you are facilitating wagers among individuals who want to wager on this product. You are taking individuals in other countries and merging it into what we call a single pool. By necessity, this system has integrity in the wagering product. There is a record. When you take all of these wagers and merge them together, you have to have records all along the way of who is wagering and on what. This is particularly true when talking about online wagering. If people are using their mobile phones as they often do today, or even with in-person wagering at the track, you will have a level of "know your customer", which is identifying who that person is and whether he or she is a person appropriate to be wagering on this product, whether there is money laundering, where the funds are coming from, whether those funds should be used for this purpose or is that person trying to do something else with them.
The social responsibility piece is fairly new in the industry but is about identifying people who may have a problem and whether measures should be taken to back them off, stop letting them wager and so on. There are processes and procedures that every tote has in place. There are reporting and banking requirements because these transactions are financial that cover the gaming piece. Every country has banking and the individual payment regulations that will potentially cover this. This is also a market-driven piece. If you are working with France to send your signal into France and you want people there to wager through the PMU and send their wagers back, the PMU has to be sure you are doing everything. Your racing must be done with integrity, be that the welfare of the horse or the wagering systems themselves and procedures to identify individuals and so forth. You not only have the rules and regulations that drive integrity in the sport, but the tote system and the market for tote is an extra level of force that drives integrity inside and outside the tote system.