This report presents a preliminary account of enforcement action taken by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (the ACMA) between 1 January 2010 and 30 June 2023 in relation to four sources of consumer protection rules arising out of the Telecommunications Act 1997 (Cth): industry codes registered under Part 6 of that Act, industry standards determined under ss 123, 124, 125 and 125AA, select service provider rules, and select carrier licence conditions.
Overall, we found 487 investigations into breaches of our select consumer protection rules that the ACMA had made public. There were 309 providers that had enforcement action taken against them, and in total 502 enforcement actions pursued by the ACMA.
The range of enforcement actions was as follows:
- 296 formal warnings
- 119 directions to comply
- 41 remedial directions
- 24 infringement notices with a total value of $6,143,160
- 17 enforceable undertakings
- 3 civil penalty orders obtained from the Federal Court totalling $1,077,625
- 1 injunction obtained from the Federal Court
- 1 deed of agreement.
The provisions that attracted the highest number of enforcement actions were those relating to:
- the obligations to provide Communications Compliance with compliance attestation documentation (240 actions)
- the provision of Integrated Public Number Database-related information (IPND) (73 actions)
- obligations relating to complaint handling (49 actions)
- requirements concerning advertising or provision of information to customers (35 actions)
- the requirements to join and comply with the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) scheme (28 actions).
Some limitations in the scope of the report and the available data should be noted. Information on compliance investigations conducted by the ACMA – as distinct from specific enforcement actions – is limited to those matters where the ACMA publicly reported a breach of one of the consumer protections rules, as the ACMA does not generally publish data on investigations where there is no breach finding. Further the ACMA may consider it is not in the public interest to publicly release information about a beach even where enforcement action is taken. Nevertheless, the report offers some insight, not otherwise available, into the ACMA’s enforcement practices over time. Further work could provide additional reflection on the effect of the ACMA’s numerous compliance audits of communications providers over this time period (noted in Annex C of the Report); the extent to which the degree of consumer harm is an element in decisions on enforcement action; the relative merits of using available alternative enforcement mechanisms (eg, formal warnings or directions to comply for code breaches); the targeting of available enforcement resources to service providers with demonstrated compliance problems; and the additional deterrence value of civil penalties and injunctions.
Finally, the material considered in this report highlights the importance of publicly available data on enforcement of consumer protection rules and suggests the need for a statutory register of completed investigations and enforcement action.
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Our research was funded by a research grant from the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network. The operation of ACCAN is made possible by funding provided by the Commonwealth of Australia under section 593 of the Telecommunications Act 1997. This funding is recovered from charges on telecommunications carriers.