There is one college assignor who charges his officials for processing their pay checks.

The latter part is typical of all camps that I am aware of. I do not consider that double dipping if you pay for a camp. The camp people need some compensation to provide the officials as they are usually not even paying for the full rate. Someone needs to be paid for their time a the clinic to run it or evaluate those working. Also camps can be expensive to run even with the money paid by the campers if they pay at all.

Peace

Our assignor is paid a fee from each school to assign their games, plus a set fee from the association. (Money that comes from officials' dues)

Do The Math ...
 

Our local board pays a salary of $26,250.00, the number one expense out of our general fund, to our assignment commissioner. This is paid out of our general fund, with the greatest receipts in our general fund coming from our membership dues ($125.00 each member, total dues of $40,625.00 ) and our assignment fees (7% of earnings which generates $35,000.00 to our general fund). Schools only directly pay officials, no money goes from the schools directly to our assignment commissioner.

You couldn't pay me enough to assign games for our local board, even using the Arbiter software. Our assignment commissioner is a class act, is fair, works his butt off, and does a great job. 325 officials. 70 high schools. Boys, girls, varsity, junior varsity, freshman. A couple of dozen middle schools. Twenty game seasons for varsity teams. League playoffs. Schedule changes. Snowouts. Sick officials. Injured officials. Officials that limit, or change, their availability. Local board guidelines to follow for assignments regarding the number, and level, of games that each official is entitled to get assigned based on each official's ratings, and ranking (not an easy job). No thank you. Just give me a ball to toss for jump balls. I don't need, or require, any additional aggravation.

Free? LOL!

We pay a booking fee of $65 to the assignor.

Schools pay the assignor $150 for each varsity team he books and $100 for any others such as JV or 9th grade. So a school with VB, VG, JVB and JVG would pay a $500 fee for the season.

Also, many schools pay the assignor a $100 check writing fee. They pay him for all the games and then he writes checks to officials instead of the schools having to write a ton of checks during the season.

Fair fee for what he does
 

Our assigner charges a very modest fee for the mental gymnastics he has to go through each season... $ 1.50/official/HS game, $1.00/official/MS game.

I assign another sport and we bill our county $76 a game for V and $68 a game for JV (per man). Of that I make 8%. As far as billing referees for arbiter, my qusetion is who owns the arbiter. If the individual assigner does, then I can see him billing you. If it is the association's, then I would think the association would roughly bill you approx $5 for arbiter use (that is what arb charges).

Last year our executive board passed a rule, that allows me to charge the official the assinger's fee ( if i choose to) after your 2nd turnback of the season. This keeps guys from choosing games and forces them to be much more up to gate on closing dates..........

IMO, we officials should not have to pay the overhead associated with assigning mechanism chosen to be used. The association is already getting a yearly registration fee and the assigner takes 8% of every dollar I make.

And considering you get hundreds of games at Boo Williams, you should have no problem forking over another $5, unless you are over paying for the food at the over priced concessions stand there ............:D:D:D:D

Why does it matter if it is a separate charge vs. added into the general fee?

When the charge is broken up, there is an impression of being taken advantage of.

That said, it makes sense that fixed costs (the Arbiter fee) would be passed on separately from the variable stuff (per game fees). I would prefer a bit of transparency, though, and my experience is that some assignors are more open than others.

Sometimes it feels like we get nickle and dimed. There's one assignor I used to deal with who suddenly started using refpay, and charging $1 for each transaction. On top of his normal game fees and Arbiter fee.

Integrity.

How about don't pass it along at all. That assignor is making money for his/her duties also and the association has a business account, why are the officials the ones that have to foot the bill for this?

Integrity? Really? They're not lying about anything or deceiving anyone. They're charging you something and tell you what it is for.

Now, if they're charging you $10 for something under the premise that it is costing them $10 but they're only paying $4 for it, sure, that is an integrity issue. But for them to make a few dollars off of anything is not an issue of integrity. If it were, every single business in the US would have integrity issues.

For that matter, it doesn't cost you $50 to do a basketball game, so why are you taking the money?

I believe most of us are independent contractors and if we do not like the fees we have to pay we can always not work for those people.

Peace