Dive Brief:
- The Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection is launching a new process that will allow interested stakeholders to flag “genuine ambiguities” and “substantive conflicts” in the agency’s rules, according to a Thursday announcement.
- If the bureau determines an issue should be addressed, it may provide guidance and publish its response for the public, Consumer Protection Bureau Director Christopher Mufarrige said in a blog post.
- “By making these interpretations and responses available, the Bureau will enhance transparency, strengthen understanding of Commission requirements, and equip businesses and industry groups with additional tools to comply with the law,” Mufarrige said.
Dive Insight:
Businesses will submit their queries via a form that will route the question to appropriate staff, the FTC said. However, the agency noted it will not answer questions that attempt to diminish a business’s own legal or compliance responsibilities” or ask to simply restate a rule.
Such questions “do not fit the parameters of the new program,” Mufarrige said, noting staff will not “respond to questions that can be readily answered by reviewing the FTC’s existing plain-language guidance.”
The new process comes as Mufarrige has emphasized a more targeted approach to rulemaking. In remarks prepared for a conference hosted by law firm Venable in March, the bureau chief said he opposed “sweeping, economy-wide rules that lack empirical grounding or displace Congress’s constitutionally-granted role as the legislative branch.”
That “does not mean, however, that I am opposed, as a rule, to all rules,” he said, according to a transcript. “To the contrary, I support narrowly-tailored rules based on strong empirical evidence, where Congress has given the Commission authority to address harms to consumers, and where the rulemaking aims to solve a clearly defined market failure.”
