Fair trading compliance
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) ensures Queensland businesses in the industries we licence consistently comply with fair trading laws.
Our compliance activities include:
- educating businesses about their legal responsibilities
- monitoring businesses to make sure they're following the law
- taking enforcement action when businesses breach the law.
We also participate in national compliance and education programs with our regulatory partner agencies in other states and territories.
Regulatory priorities
Find out about our regulatory priorities for 2024–25, including the areas of consumer harm and marketplace concern we're focussing on this year.
Compliance strategy
We have a multi-tiered compliance strategy to ensure widespread education, awareness, monitoring and enforcement.
Each compliance operation we undertake helps us better understand trader behaviour, which in turn informs our compliance strategy.
We identify risks through marketplace analysis and target our resources toward addressing those risks. We focus our efforts on the industry sectors, licensees and traders most likely to cause harm and the consumers who are most at risk.
We recognise most Queensland traders want to comply with the law.
The following image illustrates how our regulatory response escalates as a trader's attitude toward compliance deteriorates.
Our compliance and enforcement policy details how we respond to trader non-compliance.
Scheduled checks and visits
Our strategy involves conducting scheduled annual compliance operations targeting high-risk industries or national issues.
We conduct announced and unannounced visits to traders to check they're complying with the law.
This image illustrates our 3-step proactive compliance model, including proactive engagement with traders, education and compliance monitoring and enforcement.
Each year we also schedule proactive industry audits, spot checks, reviews and educational visits based on identified risks and marketplace analysis.
The schedule is detailed in our Proactive regulation of industry and marketplace entities (PRIME) program, which also sets out our strategic approach and guides our annual proactive priorities.
Unscheduled checks
We also conduct unscheduled compliance checks in response to:
- consumer or trader complaints
- emerging issues or trends
- localised issues.
Educational visits
We host educational forums, present at industry conferences and meetings and visit licensees in regulated industries. Visits provide an opportunity to discuss the trader's business practices, ensuring they don't breach fair trading laws and guiding their compliance.
Many of our educational activities are based on local area trends and topical issues.
Our outreach program ensures regional and remote Queensland towns receive educational and compliance visits.
National projects
We coordinate education and compliance activities with fair trading agencies across Australia, including the Australian Government and each state and territory government, who also operate under the Australian Consumer Law.
More information
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