by Ken Quintanilla

Guam - A week from today, over one hundred gaming machines previously thought to be licensed and registered with Rev & Tax will be revoked from establishments on Guam.

Last month when Rev & Tax did an inventory of all the gaming machines licensed and registered within the department and what was discovered was that records for over one hundred machines were not accounted for.

Close to 600 machines showed up on DRT's records however that accounted for machines registered up to 2008 - not on or before August 1, 2001 as indicated by public law. Director John Camacho explained, saying, "The cut-off date, we went back and looked back at those dates when they were licensed and after our research and investigation we basically found that there were only 265 that were registered for the liberty machines under the Guam Music."

453 Symbolix and Liberty machines were previously on record as being licensed and registered. However after the inventory, 318 were only identified being registered prior to August 1, 2001 - 265 under Guam Music, Inc. and 53 registered under Atlas Amusement Enterprises. The machines without any records were approximately 135, solely owned by Guam Music, Inc. "So we've been communicating with them during the issue of the notice, we gave them 30 days to identify those 135 that are invalidly basically licensed. And a week from today, which is October 10, they will be submitting those 135 Liberty machines that we're actually going to disable," said Camacho.

DRT says the licensed tags will be taken off the machines that are invalid and will be the responsibility of the owners to store them away in a warehouse. He adds in the event one of the licensed and registered machines are being serviced or breaks down, public law allows them to be replaced with an identical machine with notification to DRT. In the meantime Camacho says moving forward, unless other documents surface, he doesn't foresee any other machines being licensed.

"This is an instruction by me and my deputy that no more machines are registered," he said.

At the time, DRT had blamed the mishap on former licensing staff who had made an error in following procedures along with lost records through movement in the department. Camacho says while mistakes were made in the past, he's working on setting certain procedures within its compliance division to ensure there's no misinterpretation in following the law. "We're looking at monitoring all these machines basically we want to know their location and how many of them are there and we're looking at publishing it on our website," he said.