Members of the public and businesses are encouraged to contact the Commission and provide information about behaviour that appears to breach the Fair Trading Act. The Commission assesses information it receives in this way, along with information it gathers from its own market monitoring and surveillance activities, to determine the investigations that it carries out into unfair or misleading trading practices.
If the Commission considers that a breach of the Act may have occurred, it has a number of options open to it for resolving each investigation. The options include prosecuting the offending business where this is considered the most appropriate action. Only the courts can give an authoritative ruling as to whether a behaviour breaches the Act and award appropriate penalties.
The following section describes the processes followed by the Commission, along with the penalties that courts can impose for breaching the Act.