Avoid overlapping in sanctioning violations in commercial activities

That is the VCCI's comment on the draft Decree amending and supplementing a number of articles of Decree 98/2020/ND-CP regulating administrative sanctions for violations in commercial activities, production and trading of counterfeit and banned goods and protection of consumer rights sent to the Ministry of Industry and Trade .

Accordingly, the draft proposes violations and penalties, but the description of some violations is vague, providing no basis for specific determination. This may lead to the risk that businesses do not know how to ensure compliance with regulations.

For example, for violations of investor information protection, enterprises are required to impose fines of 20-30 million VND for certain acts such as not creating conditions for investors to access investor information protection rules before or at the time of information collection.

However, the Law on Protection of Investor Rights 2023 does not stipulate anything about this obligation. Instead, the Law only requires enterprises to publicly disclose and notify investors in advance.

In addition, draft Decree 98/2020/ND-CP also stipulates administrative sanctions for rice exporting enterprises that do not comply with the reporting regime or improperly or incompletely comply with the reporting regime in rice export business activities.

This regulation may overlap with the draft Decree amending Decree 107/2018/ND-CP on rice export business, which also adds a sanction for businesses that do not report, which is to revoke their licenses.

Therefore, VCCI suggested that the drafting agency reconsider the contents between the two drafts to ensure consistency between the documents. According to VCCI, the draft Decree 98/2020/ND-CP stipulating sanctions for rice exporting enterprises can be considered relatively severe.

Enterprises must regularly report at a very high frequency (weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually). This regulation seems to be heavy for rice exporting enterprises, if they miss just one of the above reports, they will be punished.

Therefore, VCCI recommends that the drafting agency consider amending this regulation, possibly amending it in the direction that if a rice exporting enterprise misses a certain number of reporting periods, it will be counted as one violation.