"Forgive me, if you will, for tossing some praise out for Phil Hogen, an honest and honorable man who in stepping down after seven years of stewardship as head of the National Indian Gaming Commission was treated rather harshly for doing a thankless job and doing it very, very well.

Hogen for seven years as head of NIGC had to balance the need to preserve tribal sovereignty with the necessity to regulate and enforce the law and provide the training and expertise tribes needed to launch a new and complex industry. It’s not like he didn’t empathize with the sensitive issue of sovereignty and self-governance. He is a citizen of the Oglala Sioux Tribe of the Lakota Nation. I suspect his understanding and appreciation of sovereignty and self-governance far exceeds many tribal people operating casinos.

During Hogen’s administration NIGC established a handbook on minimum internal controls, or MICS, for both Class II and Class III gambling. Nothing is more important to the secure operation of a casino than internal controls, particularly to a tribal gambling industry in its birth, infancy and rapid growth. Tribes most likely would have developed these standards over time. But, as Hogen said in written testimony to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs: “The industry was young and growing rapidly, of course, and the requirement of the MICS brought most of it to maturity much faster than otherwise would have been the case.”

The MICS, as Hogen said, citing the National Association of Fraud Investigators, most likely saved the tribes $1 billion or more since their inception in the early 1990s. That is not an exaggeration. Anybody who knows anything about the gambling industry will agree. Gaps in internal controls cost a gambling operation a lot of money."

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Dave Palermo: A tip of the hat to Phil Hogen (Indian Country Today 10/5)