Executive Summary
The Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) regulates an industry central to Nevada’s economy, but its core system of record was built on 1970s-era technology that was nearing the end of life. Hardware was becoming unavailable, COBOL expertise had retired, and the system supported essential functions including gaming licenses, employee registrations, investigations, tax collections, and business operations. The consequence of failure was not an inconvenience; it was regulatory, fiscal, and economic risk.
After years of uneven progress with a vendor-led modernization, the Board reached a pivotal moment in 2023. Rather than abandon nearly $21 million already invested, NGCB renegotiated the contract into a deliverables-based model and asked its internal application development team to lead the charge. The team coordinated vendor output, subject matter expert input, testing, change management, bug remediation, and user adoption while still supporting production systems and external portals.
The result was formal project completion on March 13, 2026, after a $33.8 million investment over 13 fiscal years. NGCB migrated 489 individual function screens from legacy COBOL-based technology into a modern .NET framework, created role-based access control aligned to least privilege, improved workflows across key portals and systems, resolved more than 2,300 issues during the critical project period, and preserved business continuity for a regulatory system that supports $1.2 billion in annual taxes and fees.
