Good heavens! That’s fraud or theft or some other legal no-no. If I pay for USCF membership at a tournament, that money darn well better go to the USCF. NOW and not when the organizer happens to get into the black. If your prize money is based on number of participants, it’s available. If it’s guaranteed, it better be available. To use that USCF membership money to pay for “prize money or whatever” is no different than sticking it in someone’s pocket. It’s not the responsibillity of a tournament “organizer” to check USCF ID info, collect membership fees, and see that they get properly submitted. That’s part of the job of the TD. If a TD collects USCF membership money, and doesn’t use it to pay for USCF membership immediately, that TD has stolen the money.
BTW - I’m not suggesting that the TD of the event that this thread is about has done anything wrong. And my apology if it’s interpretted that way. There are a lot of legit reasons why there could be hangups in the TD getting memberships renewed or created such as checks from the new member that bounce or are for the wrong amount. My indignation was directed at the comment that USCF membership fees paid at tournaments are commonly used for other things. To suggest that this happens in every state is an unsupportable, irresponsible statement that is a slap to the face of the great majority of TDs & Affiliates who are honest and reliable.
I highly doubt that’s the hangup with the Illinois Scholastic event. I see no reason to question this organizer’s (or any other scholastic organizer’s) integrity in that manner.
These are scholastic tournaments. There is no prize money, most of them have very little overhead, and they are run by nonprofit groups.
This is not cooking the books. This is a paperwork issue, and I’ve seen it time and again at scholastic meets.
We tell our team members to NEVER buy or renew USCF membership at a tournament; do it online early enough to get that member number in hand before the tournament.
Scholastic tournaments has a huge overhead then adult events. When you count the cost of the trophies, as trophies are a fixed cost before the event. Some organizers trophies are very simple, as the cost of 20 or 40 trophies or more do cost money. Some organizers spend an arm and a leg for the most insane size of the trophies. As an adult tournament can have a based on prize, so what comes in that day can go right back out. If the organizer spent $500 in trophies, the organizer can find themselves having 50 entries when they did plan on having 100.
If I was going to have a scholastic event with teams, only will accept advanced registeration only. There will not be any door registeration. If the team members do not have a current USCF membership one week before the event, they will not play. As the cut off date for registeration is one week before the start of the event.
I was not at the Illinois tournament, but I did hear that it had over 600 players. If there were 82 membership problems that would put it on par with the problem percentage at the supernationals.
Most Illinois scholastic tournaments, including the tournament cited, are advance registration only. During the tournament there is at least one person from the organizer that spends the day verifying memberships, and considering that a 200-player scholastic tournament is considered quite small, that is easily a full day job. The 400-500 player tournaments require 3-5 directors just to keep the tournament going, so the organizers take care of the memberships. Common problems include: a mis-spelled or mis-read name that made a valid member seem to be a new player or an invalid player (barring a valid player because the name was mis-read will lead to some heated discussions between the organizer and the parent); a membership purchased on-line that had not yet reached MSA (I’ve seen good on-line memberships take 6 days to process if not purchased through the TD/Affiliate area, and back when I first tried purchasing them in the pre-TD area days I made a mistake and thought I had initiated a purchase when I hadn’t - seeing the results of a successful purchase showed me what to expect and let me know that I had to redo the earlier failed attempt, but somebody buying personal memberships wouldn’t necessarily see enough correctly processed memberships to realize there had been a problem - I hear Nolan is working on this); a membership purchased from an affiliate that had not yet been processed by the USCF office (if a player purchased their membership at their first tournament a week or two earlier then it may not have traveled through the system yet); recently expired memberships that the team hadn’t realized needed to be renewed then; new players that the team was planning on buying memberships for on-site; new players with parents that didn’t understand USCF memberships were needed in addition to the tournament fee; players and/or parents/coaches that really do try to get by without renewing their membership.
Some sponsoring schools are moving towards web-site entry, but most still use snail mail, phone and e-mail for advance registration. Unfortunately, there are sometimes missed letters (I’ve seen one postmarked two weeks in advance that arrived one week after the event, with the address and zip code correct), overlooked e-mails (most coaches registering have the presence of mind to print copies of their registering e-mails), and organizers swamped by the last minute entries and changes (if registration is cut off four days in advance then 75% of the hundreds of entries arrive 4 and 5 days in advance). The missed entries are obviously not checked by the organizer in advance. The last minute entries might overwhelm the organizer and be put in too late to check the web site for membership information that was updated since the last supplement. Some organizers are a little slow in sending in memberships, so players have a receipt showing they’ve paid for a membership but the USCF does not yet realize it. Sometimes there is a problem with the office processing of the memberships.
As far as this specific tournament goes, this information was posted on the ilchess.org/cgi/cgi-bin/ulti … 1;t=000142) about two hours ago:
“Just to let everyone know what has been happening with the State Elementary. Everything was sent into the USCF. The renewals and new memberships were entered online. The tournament report itself was mailed in. But there was a glitch somewhere with the USCF software that only on the Charges that were individual Visa and MC, even thought they said they were good for submission did not actually submit. So hardcopies of all the renewals was then mailed in so that the USCF would also have this data. We even gave the USCF our password to check the data and they were able to get some of the renewals online to go through. I was under the impression that they were concerned about charging individuals more than once on their cards. Anyway after much time has gone by they have offered to deduct the online savings for the approx 15 memberships that haven’t cleared and they will use the hard copy info that we sent in long ago. And we have agreed to do that just to get the thing finished.
I think once they get all the kinks worked out of the new system it should be nice.
Wayne Zimmerle”
I’m getting mostly 2nd hand reports, but it appears from our e-mail logs that the memberships for that event were checked but never actually submitted for processing by the TD.
(The USCF staffer should NOT have done anything using the TD’s login and password, and all USCF employees have been reminded that there is NO CIRCUMSTANCE under which they should EVER need the member’s password for the TD/Affiliate Support Area, nor should a TD or affiliate ever be asked to provide his or her password.)
Just because a batch appears to be error-free, that does not mean it is complete or correct, the TD has to take one additional step and SUBMIT IT FOR PROCESSING, at which time the payment option has to be selected, and if the TD is paying it by credit card that’s when his or her credit card information is entered.
It does not appear that the TD ever took that step, at least I cannot find any confirmation of that transaction in any of our logs. Thus the new IDs were never issued.
At that point, the whole process kind of broke down. However, as I have reminded the office staff on several occasions, the USCF office is supposed to work with TDs to help get their events rated, not find reasons NOT to rate them. This time, that didn’t happen. Hopefully that’s just a startup issue for the new office and new staff.
I don’t know if this is related to all of the above, but as I noted on the TD/A login page some weeks ago, there appears to be an intermittent problem with processing batches that have both payments by member credit card and payment by the TD’s credit card (the information that isn’t requested until the batch is submitted).
I have not had time to work on tracking that problem down, my best suggestion for now is for TDs who have large batches with multiple types of payments in them is to enter separate batches based on the payment method, i.e., create as many as 4 batches:
A batch for payments by member credit cards
A batch for payment by TD credit card
A batch for payments by member check
A batch for payment by TD check
Once I have the June supplement cut (I started on it about an hour ago), I will be working primarily on the new membership and online registration pages for the rest of May, a task which I’d like to have running by around Memorial Day.
After that gets done, the next task will probably be the deposit account process, at which point I will need to rework how online batches are processed anyway so that’s when I hope to track down the credit card processing problem. I will be adding some other payment options at that time as well, notably e-checks.
Mike Nolan
I have done just as Mike suggests and have avoided problems. In fact some times that I have submitted memberships and paid by credit card, both my own credit card and by processing memberships online submitted to me on paper with the parents credit card. It seems that sometimes, I would receive a message that there has been a problem with a credit card.
Usually, I have just submitted the batch again and everything works just fine and it is accepted with no problems. I have not received any complaints so I believe everything has been OK.
I believe that I read in an email from the organizer that they had problems with players parent credit cards being accepted and the organizer was afraid to try and submit them again thinking that there might be a double charge placed on the card. So they apparently sent in the batch on paper with the credit card information on the paper applications. I had also heard that this all occurred during the time of the USCF move.
I really believe the organizer did everything in their power to handle things properly. I sat next to the person checking USCF memberships at the tournament all day and know that they enforced the “no pay, no play” policy.
I have changed my process to only accept cash or check made out to me as the organizer if the player wants to play and do not accept credit card payment. That way I can put the charge on my card and take care of any problems without fear that I will be placing incorrect charges on someone elses credit card.
If it was strictly my choice, I would not have the ‘payment by member credit card’ option at all. I think it creates far more problems than it solves.
Organizers who want to accept credit cards at their events should do so directly, not act as intermediaries for the USCF.
When we have the new online membership web page working, members should be able to get immediate confirmation that their credit card has been processed and their membership activated or renewed.
If I can figure out how to incorporate a similar real-time capability into a rewrite of the TD/A membership process, that might help somewhat, though problems with bad credit card numbers or insufficient information to process a charge card would still occur. Unless the TD is doing it from the tournament site during the event it is a bit late to do much about getting the corrected information from the member.