Federal Court: Clarus Telecom misled consumers
The Federal Court yesterday made declarations that Clarus Telecom breached the Trade Practices Act by misrepresenting (through their telemarketers) that their services were affiliated with or provided on behalf of Telstra.
The declarations, which were made by consent, came about after the ACCC issued proceedings against Clarus at the start of September over the conduct of its telemarketers.
In addition to the declarations, Clarus was ordered (by consent) to:
- publish corrective notices on their website
- publish an article educating the industry about compliance with the Act
- pay the ACCC’s costs of the court proceedings
- implement a Trade Practices compliance program
The ACCC media release is available here.
Although the order to pay the ACCC’s costs is the only direct financial hit against Clarus, the requirement to implement a Trade Practices compliance program could be one that ends up having the most financial sting.
Compliance programs, especially those based on the ACCC’s ‘standard’ requirements, are not easy or cheap to implement. It’s not merely a case of writing an internal policy and a implementing a cookie-cutter TPA manual. There’s also ongoing training, monitoring and auditing involved. Having an offshore call centre with a high turnover of agents can pose additional difficulties.
In a previous article, Peter Moon wrote about the potential cost blowout of implementing a TPA compliance program and how it could be managed on a budget.
Comments
Leave a Reply