www.thecentersquare.com – By Emilee Calametti | The Center Square – (The Center Square – ) 2025-04-01 12:50:00
(The Center Square) — Louisiana’s 2024 single audit requires the attention of the state government as 35 findings were reported with 16 of those being repeat findings from previous audits.
The total amount questioned relating to federal programs is $260.6 million. According to the LLA, some of the 35 findings need attention from the state government as some concern compliance reports, regulations, contracts, and grant agreements. Of that amount, the Louisiana Department of Health constitutes more than $260.1 million of the questioned costs.
The 35 findings were throughout several federal agencies, including the Department of Children and Family Services, Louisiana Workforce Commission, LSU at Shreveport, LSU Health Science Center in New Orleans, Southern University in Baton Rouge, University of Louisiana in Monroe, Louisiana Department of Health, Louisiana Tech University, and the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
The Department of Children and Family Services had $4,685 in questioned costs for overbilling of different programs as well as underbilling SNAP programs. There were also instances reported of unauthorized employee fuel transactions by a former DCFS employee that totaled $97,500 in the fiscal year 2024.
The employee under investigation resigned as of March 31, 2024. Due to misappropriation, there is an additional $37,746 in question for the DCFS. The department has $42,431 in total questioned costs.
In a response to the LLA, DCFS said, “DCFS concurs with the finding and has zero tolerance for unauthorized use of state or federal funds.”
They stated the department has developed procedures to monitor transactions every month. “Any DCFS employee engaged in such an unauthorized use of state and federal funds would be terminated.”
The Louisiana Department of Health also has $87 million in question for medical assistance programs. The audit found inadequate documentation for billed services totaling $17,402 in federal funds. For Medicaid, there is $28,793 in questioned costs, and CHIP programs have $6,042.
Both of these instances concern beneficiaries invalidly enrolled. There is $172,802 in question for ineligible maternity kick payments. The LDH also exceeded the allocated amount for DSH payments by $4,225,716 and $168 million in questioned federal costs for Medicaid expenditures.
In response to the DSH payments, the department stated, “LLA has identified $4,225,716 of total computable payments made in excess of the global DSH allotment for FFY 2016. The department will recoup funds from the facility that was overpaid and return the FFP portion of that overpayment to CMS.”
LSU Health Sciences Center in Shreveport has $2,686 in questioned costs. This is the sixth consecutive year the LSUHSC-S did not ensure proper documentation.
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette has $18,707 in questioned costs relating to Geosciences, Mental Health Research Grants, and Allergy and Infectious diseases research. The university also has $63,790 in separate questioned costs for the Office of STEM Management and Fossil Energy Research Development. The university has $82,497 in total questioned costs.
Louisiana State University at Shreveport has $101,159 in questioned costs for Federal Pell Grant Programs and Federal Direct Student Loans. The university did not return Title IV funds to the U.S. Department of Education in the required timeframe.
There were $101,159 in outstanding checks to students and parents as of January. These were issued between September 2014 to May 2024, and not returned to the USDOE.
Southern University at Baton Rouge has $39,555 in questioned costs relating to Federal Pell Grant Programs and Federal Direct Student Loans not returned to the USDOE per the guidelines of Title IV funds.
Louisiana Tech University has $206,451 in questioned costs for misappropriating research and development cluster funds. Nine electronic fund transfer payments were made to an out-of-state university that were fraudulently diverted to unknown individuals.
Many of the agencies released responses to the findings and questioned costs in the auditor’s report.
Emilee Ruth Calametti serves as staff reporter for The Center Square covering the Northwestern Louisiana region. She holds her M.A. in English from Georgia State University and soon, an additional M.A. in Journalism from New York University. Emilee has bylines in DIG Magazine, Houstonia Magazine, Bookstr, inRegister, The Click News, and the Virginia Woolf Miscellany.She is a Louisiana native with over seven years of journalism experience.
Since the 2018 Supreme Court ruling legalizing sports betting, states like Maryland and New Jersey have seen a surge in wagering, with new concerns over proposition (“prop”) bets. Prop bets, wagering on specific player stats or in-game events, are popular but raise issues of gambling addiction, player harassment, and game integrity. New Jersey Assemblymember Dan Hutchison has introduced legislation to ban live in-game prop bets due to financial harms and addiction risks. Ohio’s Governor Mike DeWine advocates an outright ban following suspicious betting incidents involving MLB players. While the industry warns that bans risk pushing bettors to illegal markets, sports leagues support restrictions on certain prop bets to protect athletes and game fairness.
As a bankruptcy attorney, New Jersey Assemblymember Dan Hutchison said he sees clients “all the time” whose betting on football and baseball quickly leads to missed car payments, delinquent mortgages and, ultimately, bankruptcy.
The rise of live, in-game bets — in which a gambler could place more than 200 individual bets during a baseball game if they wager on each pitch thrown — has only amplified his misgivings.
“And I’m like, are you kidding me? I mean, they’re betting on the next pitch, the next play, and it’s constant,” he said. “There’s no pause. It’s just not healthy.”
Worried that those bets can worsen problem gambling and threaten the integrity of sports, Hutchison, a Democrat, introduced legislation to ban New Jersey gambling licensees from offering live bets on individual plays during sporting events.
That bill illustrates growing state interest in regulating proposition bets, commonly called prop bets, a form of sports betting that is popular with fans but worrisome for sports leagues and state officials nationwide.
Unlike wagering on which team will win or the point spread of a game, prop bets can center on the performance of an individual player or even a single play that doesn’t necessarily affect the outcome of a contest. Prop bets can include trivia, such as the color of the Gatorade dumped over the Super Bowl’s winning coach, or specific stats, like how many touchdowns a certain quarterback will score during a game or which team will score first.
Critics say prop bets are easier for athletes to manipulate than the outcome of an entire game. They also make individual players more susceptible to online harassment from gamblers and increase the frequency of betting, thus raising the risk of addiction.
Ohio’s Republican governor has called for the nation’s first outright ban on prop betting on professional sports. Already, at least 15 states ban prop betting in collegiate sports, according to data maintained by the American Gaming Association, a trade group.
The heightened focus on prop bets comes amid a rapid rise of legal sports gambling, which is operational in 38 states and the District of Columbia. (Missouri plans to launch its new voter-approved program this December.) While legal betting has boosted state revenues and reshaped sports fandom, Hutchison said bankruptcy attorneys across the country are getting a preview of the financial wreckage it can wreak.
He said some clients are so distraught, he worries about potential suicides related to out-of-control gambling debts.
“That’s the reality of what’s going on. But they don’t make it seem like that when they’re doing these commercials during the football games: It’s normal, everybody does it, if you don’t do it, you’re not enjoying yourself,” he said. “That’s the glamour side of it. I deal with the other side.”
The industry’s rapid rise
The liberalization of sports gambling was made possible by a 2018 Supreme Court decision to strike down a federal law prohibiting gambling.
Since then, legal gambling has transformed the fan experience and propelled sportsbooks into major industry players: Americans are expected to wager an estimated $30 billion in legal sports betting on the NFL this season, according to the American Gaming Association. With so much money and energy flowing into gambling, academic researchers are increasingly raising concerns about the mental and financial consequences.
“The speed at which gambling has been marketed and legalized in this country is way faster than guardrails have been set to protect consumers and to try to give resources for problem gambling,” said Stephen Shapiro, a University of South Carolina professor who researches sports gambling.
Shapiro said a potential ban on prop betting in Ohio would prove a “big step” in gambling regulation. But he expects fierce opposition from the industry and consumers alike.
“They’re very popular. They’re arguably as — if not more — popular than betting on just individual games,” he said. “ … So I think there’ll be some backlash, but I also think over the next few years … there’s going to be an appetite for setting guardrails.”
The speed at which gambling has been marketed and legalized in this country is way faster than guardrails have been set.
– Stephen Shapiro, a University of South Carolina professor who researches sports gambling
The American Gaming Association, which represents casinos and sportsbooks, says that such restrictions would only drive gambling to illegal venues such as offshore betting platforms, where consumers have no protections.
But some sports leagues are ready for more restrictions on prop bets. The NCAA, the governing body for major college athletics, has been pushing federal and state leaders to ban prop betting in college sports.
The organization says 1 in 3 high-profile college athletes has received abusive messages from gamblers — the majority directed toward basketball players during tournament season. Just 12 days after North Carolina legalized sports betting last year — including prop bets on players — the University of North Carolina’s Armando Bacot reported receiving more than a hundred abusive social media messages for not accumulating enough rebounds in a game.
Women’s basketball student-athletes received about three times the number of threats as men’s basketball student-athletes, according to the NCAA.
In a March awareness campaign, NCAA President Charlie Baker said the abuse threatens the well-being of student-athletes and the overall environment of college sports.
“We need fans to do better,” he said in a statement at the time. “We need states to do better and ban player props that target student-athletes and enable detrimental abuse.”
And professional teams have their own concerns. Last month, ESPN reported the NBA and its players union supported further limits on certain prop bets. This summer, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred told reporters he would like to see some limits on prop bets.
“There are certain types of bets that strike me as unnecessary and particularly vulnerable,” Manfred said, according to Yahoo Sports.
In late July, Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine called on state regulators to outright ban all prop bets — a request he asked the professional sports leagues to support.
DeWine’s proposal followed the suspensions of Cleveland Guardians’ pitchers Luis Ortiz and Emmanuel Clase, who are being investigated by MLB. A sports betting integrity firm reportedly flagged two specific pitches Ortiz threw in early June that coincided with a pair of prop bets.
“The harm to athletes and the integrity of the game is clear, and the benefits are not worth the harm,” DeWine said in a July news release. “The prop betting experiment in this country has failed badly.”
The Ohio Casino Control Commission, which regulates sports betting, did not answer Stateline’s questions about the governor’s request. On Aug. 13, the agency said its investigation into the suspicious betting on the Guardians was ongoing.
In a statement responding to DeWine, the American Gaming Association said the Ohio incident is actually evidence that regulated gambling works: “It detects potential misconduct, it reports it, and it helps hold bad actors accountable,” said Joe Maloney, the association’s senior vice president of strategic communications.
In an interview, Maloney said eliminating legal prop betting will only move that activity into unregulated markets with no transparency. He said prop bets are a reflection of sports fandom: Bettors like to wager on their favorite players notching touchdowns or 3-pointers.
“It increases a fan’s engagement with the game they love, with the player they love. And so the idea that eliminating a legal betting market for someone really interested in increasing the level of engagement is going to prevent that activity, it’s just not the case,” Maloney said. “ … It simply will just move the activity into the shadows.”
Leagues endorse some limits
But the leagues are pushing for certain parts of the game to remain off-limits in legal betting markets.
Major League Soccer, for example, successfully pushed Illinois regulators last year to ban wagering on whether yellow and red penalty cards will be shown during a match and whether a specific player will receive a yellow or red card penalty.
Similarly, the state in February banned prop bets on NFL player injuries, player misconduct, officiating assignments, replay results and the first play of the game, following lobbying from the league.
Illinois Gaming Board spokesperson Beth Kaufman told Stateline the regulatory agency doesn’t maintain a list of specific prop bets that are allowed. But the board does require licensees to receive approval from the agency for specific wagers offered, she said.
“The IGB regularly monitors ongoing trends and developments in the industry and in major sports for any possible impact to the integrity of sports wagering in Illinois,” she said in a statement.
The NFL has pushed for similar rule changes in other states.
During a late August news briefing on gambling, David Highhill, the league’s vice president for sports betting, said the NFL has consistently objected to certain bets that raise integrity risks and provide limited fan engagement. Those include bets about officiating or player injuries and bets that are controllable by a single player on a single play.
“So things like ‘will this kicker miss a field goal’ are things that we’ve worked collaboratively across the board with operators to make sure those types of wagers are not offered,” he said.
In New Jersey, Hutchison said he doesn’t want to ban all sports betting or even all prop bets. And he knows his bill targeting so-called micro bets — those live, play-by-play bets — will face opposition, both from the industry and sports gamblers.
An avid sports fan himself, he said he doesn’t waste his money gambling on his beloved Philadelphia Eagles: “They don’t build all of those casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas because they pay out winners,” he said.
He said he’s not looking to end legal sports betting, but does think New Jersey needs to instill consumer protections and have a meaningful policy conversation about the societal costs of gambling.
New Jersey lawmakers are also considering a separate bill to ban player-specific prop bets on college sports.
The Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey says it has experienced a nearly 300% increase in calls to its problem gambling hotline since the Garden State launched legal sports gambling in 2018.
In a July statement, Luis Del Orbe, executive director of the nonprofit council, which contracts with the state on gambling addiction issues, urged lawmakers to approve the bill to ban live, in-game bets. The organization says those high-frequency bets can trigger instant dopamine releases in the brain’s reward system, fostering compulsive behaviors that can lead to addiction.
“By limiting the proliferation of micro betting, this legislation takes an essential step toward protecting citizens from the harmful effects of reckless gambling practices,” Del Orbe’s statement said.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Louisiana Illuminator, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com.
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Left
The content presents a balanced view on the issue of sports betting regulation, highlighting concerns about problem gambling and the social costs associated with certain types of bets, particularly prop bets. It features perspectives from Democratic lawmakers advocating for consumer protections and regulation, as well as industry representatives warning against overregulation. The article also references bipartisan actions, including Republican officials supporting bans on specific bets. Overall, the piece leans slightly left by emphasizing public health and regulatory measures but maintains a generally centrist tone by including multiple viewpoints and avoiding partisan rhetoric.
SUMMARY: Tuesday morning starts cool with clear skies and temperatures in the upper 50s. A few clouds and isolated showers may appear in eastern parishes and parts of Mississippi but will remain outside the main area. The region will stay mostly sunny and dry through the weekend, worsening moderate drought conditions in Arkansas. Temperatures will rise steadily, reaching the upper 90s by the weekend due to a persistent upper-level ridge over the Southern Plains. High pressure will maintain dry air and stable conditions, limiting storms. Overall, expect sunny skies, dry air, and near-zero precipitation chances throughout the forecast period.
Skies remain clear this morning as temperatures have fallen to the upper 50’s, making for a nice and cool start for this Tuesday morning. A few clouds are possible for our eastern parishes in the MS River Valley as pop-up showers and storms will be possible across parts of Mississippi this afternoon but staying outside our coverage area. More clouds could linger into tomorrow but staying mostly sunny, nonetheless. The forecast looks to stay dry all the way through the weekend, which does not help in the current moderate drought conditions in Arkansas. Temperatures will also be on the climb pushing back to the upper 90’s by the weekend.
SUMMARY: Assistant District Attorney Gary Haynes faces multiple federal felony charges related to a bribery scheme involving Lafayette’s pretrial diversion program. His defense argues Haynes was a victim, duped by co-conspirators Leonard Franques and Dusty Guidry, who pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors. Haynes allegedly lost $219,000 investing in Franques’ business, blaming District Attorney Don Landry for appointing him and hiring Guidry. Landry testified he brought Haynes back to manage the program due to a case backlog but denied involvement in wrongdoing. Prosecutors allege Haynes conspired for bribes and obstruction, facing up to 65 years if convicted. The trial continues with Landry’s cross-examination.
