Optus' Regulatory Compliance team manages key compliance tasks and regulatory processes for Optus. In addition, the team acts as a liaison between Optus and a number of key regulatory stakeholders, and manages Optus' reporting requirements to these stakeholders.

Telecommunications Consumer Protections Code

The Telecommunications Consumer Protections (TCP) Code 2012 is the primary Code for all telecommunications service providers and outlines a range of key consumer safeguards and protections and sets out mandatory requirements in relation to:

• Consumer Sales, services and contracts (including advertising, sales conduct, contracts, customer service, critical information summaries and information available on our website);
• Billing;
• Complaint handling;
• Credit and debt management (including credit checking, debt collection, financial hardship and spend control tools such as usage alerts);
• Changing suppliers (for customer transfers); and
• A new code compliance and monitoring framework.

The current version of this industry code took effect on 1 September 2012.

Optus has a long history and commitment to self-regulation and is committed to complying with the TCP Code. We have demonstrated this over the past decade by becoming a signatory to the previous version of the Code and the majority of its predecessor codes. We also demonstrated this commitment by actively participating in the development of this new version of the Code.

We have made a significant investment so that we can fully comply with the TCP Code. We are proud of our staff who have worked hard to ensure Optus meets and, in many cases, exceeds the requirements of the Code to deliver great outcomes for our customers.

Whilst there remain a few items which we continue to progress, these primarily relate to one of our niche product offerings – special pricing plans offered to the employees of some of our large corporate customers – rather than our mass-market products. Our corporate employee offers amount to less than 1% of Optus’ Customer base. As such we have submitted a Compliance Achievement Plan to the new monitoring body, Communications Compliance. To ensure our customers have visibility of our progress and commitment to complying with the TCP Code a copy of the Achievement Plan can be downloaded here. We will continue to complete the remaining activities over the coming months.

Protecting our Customers

Communications Alliance Ltd, the primary telecommunications industry body association, has published a brochure on the code called Protecting Our Customers. To assist our customers in understanding the key aspects of the TCP Code and how it relates to them, we are pleased to make this available.