It's more hassle than it's worth really. The company isn't going to fold because it excludes a few members of staff and family from playing so why take the risk? If I were to lose £1,000 in my own Casino then what's to say I don't decide to run a random prize draw the next day paying £1,000 and I magically happen to win it? It's easier and much more transparent to simply say noone who has any association with the business can play.
We also have test accounts that use company cards. These are held by the QA team and transactions are recorded as for test purposes, so we don't pay rev share/tax on them and we can account for them when needed. We're not allowed to play in the Bingo at all, but it's easier to cancel ticket purchases in Bingo so it's a moot point.
Plus you have to remember we have a UAT environment which is an exact replica of our live environment. If we didn't have this then we'd be shooting in the dark every time we do an update.
It could also be said that it's more hassle than it's worth to go after family living elsewhere as opposed to keeping it a matter of the employee and the contract of employment. The problem is that the family are adults in their own right, and the employee has no legal authority to tell them what to do, so it would be up to the casino to police the system, but as we all know, they can't even police problem gamblers, duplicate accounts, etc at the point of registration, so what chance that they could figure out that Jane Smith from Cardiff is the sister of their employee Bill Smith who works in their London office, and block her from even registering, let alone playing. Having to look out for this is the real hassle.
It may have been easier when casinos were licenced in a jurisdiction that prohibited locals from playing, and employees were sourced locally. It would have been an automatic brake on close family and the employee playing.
Casinos may well find that they DO have family members playing that shouldn't be, but that they can't detect this. As they don't know, they don't see it as a problem unless someone actually tries something, as happened with the Absolute Poker scandal that revolved around a fraud committed by employees who ran special accounts through friends and families that could see all the hole cards. It was the player community that busted the fraud, not the operator, and only because the cheating was so widespread it made itself blindingly obvious to many, and at a level where it could be proven mathematically despite all the denials from the operator.
If I got a job at, say,
32Red, it's possible that unknown to me, some of my family members might be drawn to play there, and although they know that I play (which is not always the case in families), I doubt it would occur to them that I might "work for the enemy", so they would not think to ask me if it was OK to play there.
As an exercise, it might be worth asking all employees in your operation how sure they are that this rule is being obeyed by their family members, and how they have gone about policing it. If any are unsure, it's a possibility that a small number of violations have taken place.
