Thousands of S.C. lottery players are closer to finding out why the Holiday Cash Add-A-Play tickets they bought on Christmas Day mistakenly were all winners.

Meanwhile, lottery officials told a joint S.C. House-Senate panel that they share their impatience at the time it has taken to identify what caused the mishap.

For two hours on Christmas Day, some 42,000 winning tickets – with a prize of at least $500 each – mistakenly were printed at several convenience stores across the state.

That glitch could cost the S.C. Education Lottery more than $33 million in payouts. About $1.7 million already has been paid out in prize claims, said Hogan Brown, the lottery’s interim executive director.

On Thursday, Intralot, the lottery’s computer system vendor, handed its software code over to an outside firm that has been hired to investigate the glitch, Brown said. That exchange took longer than expected, he added.

Intralot was awarded a contract to be the lottery’s system vendor in 2007. A new contract was awarded in May to a competing company, Brown said. Intralot since has protested that decision.

To the lottery’s knowledge, Intralot has never had problems like the one on Christmas Day, Brown said.

“I wish whoever is investigating this would do a deep drill into this because it just doesn’t make sense,” said state Sen. Harvey Peeler, R-Cherokee. “It just does not make sense (that) this happened.”