The Norwegian Lottery and Foundations Authority has acknowledged a major technical issue that blocked hundreds of public tip-offs from reaching its enforcement team for over a year.
Between March 2024 and June 2025, the authority’s tip submission form was not correctly linked to its archive system, resulting in potentially vital reports on illegal gambling and foundation misconduct going unnoticed by investigators.
Atle Hamar, the authority’s director, mentioned:
We are concerned that we may have missed important tips, and hope people will send us their tips again.
We depend on tips from the public, and people should have confidence that the tips they send will reach us. This is a serious mistake, and it took far too long for us to discover it.
The authority depends significantly on public tip-offs to carry out its oversight duties, with the majority concerning illegal gambling, although it also receives reports about foundations and grants to nonprofit organizations.
he technical issue primarily impacted anonymous tip-offs, as the submission form was the sole method for the public to report concerns anonymously. During this time, some reports still reached the authority via other means such as email, contact forms, and phone calls.
The authority was able to recover 120 tips from the last two months of the error period, but the rest were automatically erased in accordance with privacy laws.
The director added:
This means that several hundred tips may be lost to us, but we do not have exact numbers. We will thoroughly review this and make the necessary changes to prevent something similar from happening again.
People should have confidence that the tips they send will be received, and that we will take them seriously. Getting tips is important to us. Several of our inspections start with tips from the public.
The system issue has been resolved, and the authority is now encouraging individuals who submitted tips during the affected timeframe to resend their information.
