Alcohol retailers lag behind OLCC watchdogs' compliance goals

A report from Thursday's meeting showed a 77% compliance rate among liquor compliance checks.

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — The Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission’s push to crack down on businesses that sell certain products to minors has yet to reach its compliance goal among alcohol retailers.

OLCC has conducted “minor decor operations” since 2017, with a two-year hiatus from 2021 to 2022 due to the pandemic. For these operations, the agency enlists minors between the ages of 18 and 20 years to attempt to buy liquor or cannabis. The program is one way officials strive to enforce state laws.

The commission shoots for 90% compliance. A report from Thursday’s meeting shows there was a 91% success rate among the 471 marijuana operations conducted through June, which met the goal, but only a 77% success rate among the 607 alcohol operations.

According to Rich Evans, the senior director of licensing and compliance, this program has become especially difficult with the “proliferation” of fake IDs that aren’t detected by scanner systems.

“At a recent community event where alcohol was being served, an OLCC inspector confiscated 10 fake IDs and then checked them using an ID scanner; the scanner indicated all of them were legitimate,” OLCC said in a release.

And just last year, the commission announced it would further regulate home alcohol deliveries conducted by third-party companies such as Doordash, Instacart and Grubhub. The apps are now required to train drivers on the correct practices for liquor delivery.

Despite this, the commission reported a 76% compliance rate among the two operations that targeted at-home deliveries. But officials noted that regulations “aren’t as stringent” for third-party companies as they are for brick-and-mortar retailers.

OLCC’s licensing and compliance director is also working to ensure officials enforce consistent, appropriate penalties for those who violate the law.

“If you’re handed a citation and then nothing happens, you really have no compliance program,” Evans said. “We also had the other extreme where we actually had a nursing student that was signed criminally at a 7-Eleven… that was kicked out of a nursing school for the criminal violation… You can steal a car in Portland and not go to jail, why would this person get kicked out of nursing school?”