TPA Compliance

Tethys Consulting offers a Trade Practices Act Compliance solution which is specifically targeted at helping you resolve and avoid issues associated with the Trade Practices Act.

Like it or not, every company is bound by the Trade Practices Act – you must be compliant in your sales, advertising and retailing practices. However, the legislation here can have an effect on many other elements of your business. This can cause problems for many organisations.

The fact here is that Trade Practices Act compliance is not a choice – it is a necessity. Failure to comply can lead to severe penalties. Individuals may find themselves liable for fines that run into hundreds of thousands of dollars and business may be fined millions.

Ignorance Is No Excuse

It doesn’t really matter if you didn’t realise that you were at fault or were failing to comply with the Act – over 80% of breaches here are estimated to be unintentional - you’ll still have to take the punishment when it comes. This could have a very real impact on the financial success and market perception of your business. 

But, complying with the Trade Practices Act can actually bring you some very real business benefits as well. For example, you’ll be telling your customers that you are a company that they can trust as you are meeting your legal obligations and following the letter of the law. It is, therefore, far better to make the right moves and to make sure that you achieve compliance before it is forced on you. Many of our customers, for example, use our expertise to help audit their compliance programmes as set out by the ACCC to make sure that they are on track.

The fact is – if you are found to breach the Act – that you will be forced to take action to become compliant. This process – known as remediation – may not simply involve fines. It can also involve processes such as public advertising, repatriation and the establishing of compliance programmes. This process may well make it public that you have failed to meet your TPA obligations which could have a seriously adverse effect on your business.

Mitigate the Risk

We can help you ensure that your organisation is Trade Practices Act compliant. With our help you can be confident that you are operating within the framework of the law – and, if you are unintentionally breaching the Trade Practices Act, we can help you correct what’s happening.  If the ACCC has investigated you, history shows that a structured compliance programme can help reduce any penalties you have to pay. Our solid business and consultancy experience will also make sure that you reap any associated business benefits at the same time.

What makes us different is our experience. We have the ability to provide solutions from a commercial perspective, and not just a legal one.  This ensures that we understand the realities of your own commercial needs as well as your legal requirements to the Act as a whole. This understanding makes it far easier for us to help your company and to work successfully with your staff. And, it guarantees that you get effective commercial guidance as it applies to the legal ramifications of your TPA responsibilities.

Our TPA Compliance solution can be fully tailored to the needs and situation of your organisation. Our cost effective solutions include:

TPA Compliance Audits

Our audits are designed to make sure that your existing TPA compliance programme is operating as it should to protect your business interests. Many of our customers simply use our impartial services to check that their business is working to full compliance to avoid problems with the TPA. Others, having been penalised in the past, will have been directed to set up a suitable compliance programme. In this instance part of their penalty will involve impartial external audits for a three year period.

In either case, as external experts, we can review your organisation and make sure that all of your staff – from the top down – are aware of their own obligations and those of your business. In keeping with this, our services cover:

• Procedural Compliance Audits – these audits make sure that your compliance processes, policies, procedures, protocols are working to best effect.  Our audits won’t simply tell you where you are going right or wrong – we’ll also make sure that we can help you maximise benefits and address problems to keep you in line with legislation.
• TPA Knowledge Audits – these audits will help you ensure that all relevant staff within your organisation know when they have a TPA responsibility. This is a vital process when you consider that most breaches of legislation here are not intended and are often made by staff that have not been made aware of their TPA responsibility. These audits are based on a simple and secure web based solution that will show you quickly where your internal TPA training needs apply.

TPA Compliance Programmes

Our TPA Compliance Programme is designed to meet the recommendations of the ACCC that an organisation should maintain a TPA programme that considers both Procedural and Behavioural Compliance. We can help you put together a complete programme that covers all issues or can work with you on those elements that are not yet covered within your business.  We work with Australian Standard 3806 which provides an effective framework for producing a compliance programme that can be easily set up, implemented, maintained, monitored and assessed. Individual elements include:

• Procedural Compliance Programs – these programs involve issues such as processes, policies, procedures and protocols. They are usually made available to staff via hard copy manuals or via an Intranet. The aim here is to enable all staff to understand the company’s TPA’s responsibilities. Our aim is to make your programme work seamlessly with your organisational goals.
• Behavioural Compliance Programs – simply having a policy and procedures manual won’t help you if you breach the Act. You also need to make sure that all internal personnel understand how legislation impacts on the business as a whole and how it impacts on their own jobs and responsibilities. To this end we can help you design and run specific TPA compliance training that is tailored to the needs and roles of your staff to make sure that they understand their own TPA responsibilities.

TPA Training Courses

Analysis shows that the majority of TPA breaches were unintentional. In many cases they are made by employees who – through no fault of their own – simply don’t understand how the Act works. To avoid these errors, we have put together a targeted training programme that can help both you and your employees understand both how the Act works in theory and how it works in commercial practice. Each of our courses will be tailored to address your chosen business sectors and will include relevant case studies to make sure that you understand exactly how the TPA affects you and your company.

Our training courses include:

• General Course – Part IV and Part V of the Act
• Short Courses – to cover either Part IV or Part V of the Act
• Specific Area Courses – to cover single sections of the Act
• Train the Trainer courses – for larger organisations with in-house training
• Open Courses – for smaller companies or individuals.

Conference Presentations

Using a presentation on the Trade Practices Act at a conference may seem unusual but this is an ideal opportunity to inform, educate and inform internal and external stakeholders. We have created a range of entertaining presentations that include real-life case studies from some of the country’s leading businesses. Our aim here is to make sure that your audience can tap into our Trade Practices Act knowledge using our expertise, humour and anecdotes. And, you can use this service to cover updates and changes to the Act to be used as part of any existing compliance programme so you may well save on training costs into the bargain.

All of our presentations can be targeted to suit your business and TPA needs and can be set up to meet your conference schedule. For example, our presentations can cover:

• An overview of the TPA
• Restrictive Trade Practices (Part IV of the Act)
• Unfair Trade Practices (Part V of the Act)
• Consumer Rights and Obligations
• Marketing and Selling under the TPA
• Any specific section(s) of the Act.

TPA News and Information

We offer a TPA subscription service that allows users to be briefed on relevant news items, information and changes via a monthly email bulletin. This service also includes access to an extensive online library of information and targeted case studies. Subscribers can access:

• Monthly Information Bulletin – as a subscriber you will receive a news bulletin every month. These bulletins will keep you informed on TPA changes, will give you access to recent case studies and can be used internally as part of your TPA compliance programme. You will also be able to access our library of past bulletins – all of which are maintained in a print friendly format for ease of use.
• TPA Information Library – you will also be able to access our extensive library on the Trade Practices Act. The library is divided into two sections: ACCC and TPA Matters and Marketing and Selling. Here you will find guidelines on selling and marketing, TPA news, case studies and information about the ACCC. All contents are presented in clear language, keeping legal terms to a minimum.
• Case Studies – you’ll also find a series of case studies within the library. These ‘real-life’ examples feature some of the best known companies in Australia and show the actual breach of the Act and any penalties that were levied. We set up each case study with a ‘Business Hint’ to make sure that you understand the mistake(s) that were made and how to avoid them.
• Online Training Course – we provide a self-study training course, conveniently broken down into 9 easy to follow modules to enable your staff to educate themselves about the TPA.

Click here to access the Trade Practices Act Compliance website and subscription service.

To find out how Tethys Consulting can help you make sure that your business complies with the Trade Practices Act, please contact us.

 

“Punishment is lame, but it comes.”

George Herbert