A Florida Reports explainer, companion piece to our coverage of Seminole Tribe of Florida v. DraftKings, Inc.
Florida’s 2021 Gaming Compact guarantees the state a minimum of $2.5 billion from the Seminole Tribe over the compact’s first five years, with a revenue-share rate that scales from 12% to 17.5% of “Net Win” depending on volume. That’s the headline number everyone quotes. What gets quoted far less is how Florida actually confirms that number is right — and the honest answer is: indirectly, and largely through a process the Tribe itself pays for.
Two different audits, neither of them fully independent of the Tribe
The compact actually sets up two separate audit mechanisms, and it’s easy to conflate them.
The first, under the compact’s Part VIII, “State Monitoring of Compact,” lets the State secure an annual audit covering both general compliance and — specifically — verification of “Net Win and the basis and amount of the Payments the Tribe is required to make.” On paper, this is the more state-controlled mechanism: the audit firm is, in the compact’s own words, “selected by the State, subject to the consent of the Tribe, which shall not be unreasonably withheld.”
The second mechanism sits in the compact’s revenue-share payment provisions — the recurring quarterly “true-up” and annual reconciliation that actually produces the number Florida gets paid. For this one, the compact says plainly: “the Tribe agrees to engage its independent auditors to conduct a review of the un-audited net revenue from Covered Games” and to “require its independent auditors to provide an audit report with respect to Net Win.” These are the Tribe’s own regular financial-statement auditors — the same kind of firm any company uses for its annual books — producing the report the state actually relies on for the payment calculation itself.
The thread connecting both: the Tribe pays, the Tribe consents, and the scope is bounded
Whichever mechanism is doing the work, a few things hold true across the board. The Tribe pays for both: “the Tribe shall pay the auditing firm for the costs of the annual independent audit” — even in the “state-selected” Part VIII process, the Tribe is footing the bill for the people checking its own math. The Tribe also holds a consent right over who does the state-selected audit — not an absolute veto, but real leverage over who gets the job.
And the information that actually flows to the state is bounded by design. The compact requires the Tribe to “provide all necessary cooperation” for the audit, but every place that obligation actually gets defined, it’s scoped narrowly: discussions between Florida’s compliance agency and the auditors are “limited to Covered Games information, including the information specified in Section A.1 and A.2” — not open-ended. For the recurring revenue-share true-up, the Tribe is obligated to “make available to the State… the basis for the calculation of the payment” — a defined package of supporting information, not a standing right for the auditor to go digging for more if something looks off. Nowhere in the compact is there language giving either auditor an independent right to demand records beyond that defined scope.
What this means in practice
No one outside the Tribe — not the public, not independent researchers, not even the State Government in full — gets direct access to the Tribe’s actual win/loss figures. Which means Florida’s taxpayers have no real way of knowing whether they’re being shortchanged, or simply collecting whatever crumbs the Legislature bargained for on their behalf. The Tribe isn’t required to publicly disclose casino-level revenue, and even its private disclosure to Florida’s government is limited to a finished audit report and a defined set of supporting figures — not the underlying books themselves, and not to anyone outside the Tribe’s own engaged auditors and the narrowly scoped state process. The National Indian Gaming Commission doesn’t release tribe-specific numbers either. The only way outside observers have ever estimated what the Tribe really earns is by working backward from the public revenue-share checks using the known percentage formula — not from real financial statements.
None of this means the Tribe is lying about its numbers, or that the $2.5 billion figure is wrong. It means the structure Florida agreed to doesn’t give the state — or the public — an independent way to check.
Based on a direct read of the 2021 Gaming Compact between the Seminole Tribe of Florida and the State of Florida.