Vegas casinos wrote off fewer bad gambling debts in 2016

Casinos on the Las Vegas Strip had one of their best years in recent memory in terms of writing off uncollectable gambling debts, according to 2016 figures.

David Schwartz, a longtime number cruncher at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Center for Gaming Research, filed a report last month examining credit issued to gamblers by Nevada casinos, using data culled from the Nevada Gaming Abstract, dipping as far back as 1980.

Nevada casinos don’t directly reveal their credit activity but the Abstract’s casino expenses section does contain a column indicating ‘bad debt’ provisions, which Schwartz says offers insights into how well casinos are managing their credit risks.

In fiscal 2016, Strip casinos – which bear the overwhelming bulk of the state’s bad debt expenses – reported writing off bad debts of nearly $110.2m. While that sounds massive, it’s actually the second-lowest total in the past 10 years and pales in comparison to some of the bad debt provisions Strip casinos made in the 1990s.