Spain’s Court of Audit seeks further details on €3.539bn in unclaimed prizes
Regulation2 min read
In brief
- Spain's Court of Audit says SELAE has not answered a parliamentary request on €3.539bn in unclaimed prizes.
- SELAE questions the calculation and says expired prizes revert to the Treasury.
- The court found 519 payment files from 2023 to 2025 with incomplete or missing documentation, worth €14.79m.
Spain's Court of Audit said that state lottery operator Loterías y Apuestas del Estado (SELAE) has not provided the response requested on €3.539bn in unclaimed prizes. The finding is in the court's latest follow-up report on recommendations made to the state-owned company.
The report was approved on 29 October and contains information updated to July. The parliamentary request for the information was approved on 18 May 2025 by the Joint Commission for Relations with the Court of Audit. It was published in the BOE on 15 July of that year.
The company says the method used to arrive at that sum is unknown to it. It also disputes that undistributed prizes are a suitable legal or accounting category, and argues that uncollected prizes should be kept separate from unclaimed ones. The company notes that when the statutory period for collecting a prize expires, the money goes back to the public Treasury and is recorded as other operating income. The Court of Audit judges that these explanations fall short of what Congress asked for. In the court's view, Congress wanted more than the accounting treatment: it also asked how the amounts are handled and which criteria are used to record them.
The report also records that the court identified 519 prize-payment files for 2023 to 2025 in which supporting documentation was incomplete or missing. The amount linked to these files is €14.79m. The report sets this against total major-prize payments of more than 6,860 million over the period analysed.