David Naulls
Telecom in a settlement with the Commerce Commission has agreed to pay Consumer NZ $75,000 towards the development of an internet-based telecommunications price comparison site.
The site will work similarly to our Powerswitch site and will allow users of telecommunications services to compare plans and prices.
The money comes because Telecom has admitted its marketing of its Basic Broadband Plan between April and June 2008 breached the Fair Trading Act (FTA) in a number of ways: it didn’t adequately explain there was a minimum 12-month contract, that the initial price was for only the first six months of each contract, and that there was a data cap of 200MB a month.
The $75,000 provides a welcome impetus for a project we’ve been working on for some time, but the fact we’ve received it at all raises serious questions about Telecom’s business culture. This is not the first time Telecom has been pinged for breaching the FTA – far from it. Since 2003 Telecom has now received warnings or been fined eight times for breaching the Act.
For a leading New Zealand company, this is an extraordinary record of non-compliance with one of our major consumer laws. Some of its plans are complex, but that’s even more reason to market them accurately and fairly.
Telecom’s Group General Counsel Tristam Gilbertson said after the latest settlement that Telecom has been “on a concerted drive to improve our compliance processes … targeted refresher training for Telecom’s marketing teams has already been undertaken”.
Perhaps it needs to find a copy of the Telecom Consumer Law Compliance Manual. I know this manual exists because I wrote it for them in the early 1990s when I was working as a freelance writer. Amongst its nine “cardinal rules" were:
- Do not mislead customers.
- Make sure charging and pricing information is correct and includes all charges.
- Ensure that all statutory requirements have been complied with.
- When in doubt seek legal advice.
It seems dead simple. If Telecom can’t find a copy, I can always send them mine.
David Naulls
Editor
Consumer Magazine
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