April 23, 2014
The Department of Trade and Industry’s Consumer Protection Group (DTI-CPG) is proposing to tighten regulations in the Consumer Protection Act, specifically ramping up penalties in the law and adding provisions that cover online commerce.
“We are now in the stage of proposing amendments to our consumer-protection law, increasing penalties from P500 to a minimum of P50,000 for any violation of the Consumer Protection Act to a maximum of P1 million from the present P 300,000 in the Consumer Protection Act,” Trade Undersecretary for Consumer Protection Victorio A. Dimagiba said.
Sources at the trade department said mounting complaints against unscrupulous traders and the apparent helplessness of the government in some instances have made a strengthening of the Consumer Protection Act a priority of the department.
Aside from increasing administrative fines, criminal fines will also be increased, Dimagiba added, although he said the administrative penalties being implemented by the national government are very similar to those in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, of which the Philippines is a member.
The current consumer-protection law was passed in 1992 and has remained virtually unchanged.
Consumer protection covers product standards, false and misleading information, product liabilities, deceptive and fraudulent transactions, Dimagiba said.
Online commerce is another pertinent issue that needs to be addressed in updating the Consumer Protection Act, especially regulations covering products sold online at promo prices.
“We have basically administrative rules on online commerce for products on promo rates, but we want to put them in the law. We want to strengthen e-commerce. We have been receiving complaints about products that are too good to be true. We want to look at the legitimate vendors who are not securing permits for promos,” Dimagiba said.
Electronic commerce began as a business five years ago and although the existing e-commerce law should have covered this, there is a loophole on the area of consumer protection, the undersecretary revealed.
The majority of the complaints received by the Bureau of Consumer Protection has been that of “non-full disclosure” on the part of online vendors. This issue pertains to items whose actual specifications do not match those pitched to the buyer.
The draft of the proposals is expected to be submitted next week to the Senate Committee on Trade, Commerce and Entrepreneurship, chaired by Sen. Paolo Benigno “Bam” Aquino IV.
(Business Mirror)