One of the ways the Commerce Commission works to tackle cross-border offending is to link up with our international counterparts. Competition and consumer agencies worldwide have long recognised the benefits of maintaining relationships with each other and a number of formal and informal networks exist.
ICPEN is an informal network of governmental consumer protection authorities from about 50 countries. The authorities cooperate to share information about cross-border activities affecting consumers and to encourage international cooperation among law enforcement agencies.
The Commission has been a member of the ICPEN network for many years. We have played a leading role in implementing an intelligence function within the network, on the basis of our own recent experience establishing and running an intelligence unit.
By gathering information from members and analysing that material, the ICPEN Intelligence Working Group looks to capture new or emerging issues and trends on a global level. This provides information to help members identify the priority areas for ICPEN to focus on each year.
As well as regularly catching up via teleconference, ICPEN members share a website - for more information go to www.icpen.org. Members can also access complaints from around the world on www.econsumer.gov, a website that allows consumers to report complaints about online and related transactions with foreign companies.
The network also runs a number of regular initiatives including:
- fraud prevention month – a series of education campaigns run every year on consumer protection themes
- international sweep days – an annual global web-surfing exercise to search for sites that may be deceiving or defrauding consumers
- best practice training – seminars for members on relevant topics.
Here are just some of the issues we discussed at the recent ICPEN conference:
- Internet/digital enforcement – regulators need to keep abreast of technological developments to meet the challenges of a borderless, increasingly digital world where traders are changing the ways they transact.
- Mobile payments – learning from jurisdictions that have started using next generation mobile payments technology. While the technology that promises to enable consumers to pay for goods and services with their mobile phones (“the mobile wallet”) is being trialled in New Zealand, it has been launched in some overseas jurisdictions. This market is rapidly evolving and an ICPEN project has been established to learn from overseas experiences and to identify the consumer issues.
- Case studies on various business models being used globally, for example, group buying sites and penny auctions.
Sharing information and resources with overseas counterparts not only allows us to better deal with global issues but also with those in our own backyard. Thanks to the new Commerce Commission (International Co-operation, and Fees) Act our ability to cooperate with each other has been further enhanced. Under the Act, we can provide compulsorily acquired information and investigative assistance to overseas regulators with whom we have a cooperation arrangement. This can only serve to strengthen our effectiveness in protecting citizens of our global village.
