[tournament-org] Consultation on the BGA Levy

[Matt Marsh]

Hi Colin,

A few of my thoughts:
 • In my experience, management of the BGA's levy system has always been quite loose. It relies a lot on trust - tournament organisers generally rely on players declaring whether they are a member or not, whether it's their first tournament etc. The BGA relies on tournament organisers submitting the correct levy payments. 

Some organisers will check such things more than others, but the overall looseness of the mechanisms will have led to significant margin of error in payments taken I suspect.
 • If the EGF is to have a similar levy system they need to decide if they are happy with a loose system like ours - and accept the margin of error that will undoubtedly result - or whether they want a more formal mechanism which might have a greater admin overhead
 • Players in the EGD already have a unique identifier (EGD PIN) and presumably this would be the basis for checking whether a player is a member of an EGF affiliated organisation or not. To me, this is really the basis of the 'EGF Passport' that Gerry suggests, I think?

I'd expect that, as an organiser, I should be able to go to some online tool and enter the EGD PINs for all the players entered into my tournament and it should tell me which are members and which are not. It doesn't need to divulge anything else
 • For the above to be useful it would help for tournament organisers to be more consistent in collecting player EGD PINs on tournament entry. Currently some organisers do this, others do not. There would be other benefits of this too since often post-tournament there are queries when we're trying to understand whether a given player is a new player or in fact someone already in the EGD. 
 • Even new players could be asked to register for an EGD PIN prior to entering a tournament. This way we can ask that *all* players provide an EGD PIN on tournament entry. This would remove ambiguities that we get at present, whilst also providing a framework for identifying the correct levy charge to apply to any player.
 • The EGF could even choose, if they wished, to charge all players an annual fee to keep their PIN active. It is obviously a different scheme, but this would remove the complication of the EGF having to receive fees from each member organisation and some of the overheads involved...
Matt

On Mon, 25 Sep 2023, at 16:21, secretary at britgo.org wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> I am looking for some input on lessons learned from running the BGA Levy system on tournaments. In fact this is to help the EGF, but will indirectly help ourselves as well. I have circulated this to the tournament organisers list, and a few others who will have relevant experience. I need to explain the background to this request first …
>  
> Background:
> The EGF is proposing to change the way it charges membership fees to its member countries. If it gets agreement (possibly a big if) this will be applicable from 2025. The details are as yet undecided, and I did expect there to be a formal consultation exercise, but it now looks like they will just bring their proposal to the 2024 AGM and vote on it. However, as we already run a system which is similar to their proposal (the levy system) they are keen to hear from us about what works well and what doesn’t. Hence we may have some ability to shape the debate before next year’s AGM.
> 
>  
> Proposed Fee Structure:
> From 2025 the EGF membership fee for each country will consist of two components
> 
>  1. A set annual amount per member from that country, plus
>  2. For each tournament played in that country which is submitted to the EGD, a small participation fee for each player in the tournament *which will vary according to the status of the player*. Players who are members of a national association which is in the EGF will incur a much smaller fee than non-members.
>  
> The first part requires each country to maintain a list of its members. The second part means that the BGA will be charged based on UK tournament participation, *regardless of which country the players are from.* Whilst we have still to discuss this it is likely that the BGA will expect Tournament Directors to pay that component to the BGA, who will then pay the EGF. How the TD’s set the price for their events will of course be down to them, but the EGF fees will apply to all events submitted to the EGD.
>  
> An example:
> Please note these numbers are from my head and are very much *indicative only* and the final figures will be set as part of the debate with the EGF. The scheme may look like:
>  • The BGA pays 2 or 3 euro annually to the EGF for every member we have.
>  • For each tournament held in the UK, the EGF will charge the BGA 0.5 euro for every participant who is already a national member of an EGF country, and 2 euro for every non-member.
>  
> Some immediate implications:
> The EGF have already realised that TDs will want to charge non-members more than members, given that non-members will cost them more. This means that that TDs will need easy access to a Europe-wide membership database, so they can quickly check for each entrant whether or not they are a paid up member of an EGF country. The EGF know they have to build this database, and then persuade all member countries to keep it up to date. Without this the system is unworkable as TDs won’t be able to do differential charging.
>  
> Just a little thought raises a whole slew of questions on the detail of this, none of which we have answers to yet. Some that I can think of are
>  • What about multi-day tournaments, is the charge per day? If so how would the EGF know which rounds were on which days to raise the correct bill?
>  • What about first-time tournament players where typically we don’t charge? Will the EGF do the same?
>  • What about concessions? Will the charges for juniors etc be lower, and if so how will the EGF know who qualifies for a concession?
>  • Will online tournaments/events be charged?
>  • Will the membership database say when the person’s membership starts and ends, and will that be used by the EGF in their billing calculations?
>  
>  
> Sorry for the length of this, but what I would like from you please are your experiences of handling our current levy system, what problems it has caused you, and how you got round them. Also given the proposed structure above, what would be needed to make it workable for you?
>  
> I will collate all the responses and create a document to send in to the EGF. It will ostensibly be  a ‘lessons learned’ document, but if there is a strong view on any topic I can use it to put the case for the things we want to see.
>  
> Thanks in advance.
>  
> *Colin Williams*
> BGA Secretary      mail:  secretary at britgo.org
> 
>  

-- 
*Matt Marsh*
matt at crazedbytes.net
07795 297779 <tel:+44-7795-297779> / +44 7795 297779 <tel:+44-7795-297779>
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