If you contact us to complain about a business or person you believe has breached consumer and/or competition law, we then consider your complaint according to our enforcement criteria. We receive thousands of complaints each year and are not able to respond to everyone who contacts us with a complaint. If we need more information we will be in touch with you.

We assess every complaint we receive, but we are unable to investigate all of them. Our focus is to make sure New Zealand markets work well and consumers and businesses are confident when buying or selling goods and services. This means that we tend to be most interested in the issues causing widespread harm to New Zealanders. Complaints like yours help us to identify these issues.

If we do decide to investigate

This can take some time as investigations can be complex. We may not be able to provide information about an investigation, while it is ongoing but we will update you when possible.

If we do not investigate a complaint

We understand that this may be disappointing for complainants, but we do value all complaint information and will keep the information provided in our complaints database. We use this database to identify business practices of possible concern and to help us decide what to investigate in the future.

We also use our database to highlight possible areas of consumer harm in our annual Consumer Issues report. You can find our annual Consumer Issues report on our website.

Disputes

We are not a dispute resolution service and generally cannot assist you to get a refund or personal remedy. Other organisations may be able to assist you in resolving your individual dispute, including Consumer Protection, the Citizens Advice Bureau or one of your local Community Law Centres – you can find more information on our website.

You should not wait for the outcome of any action we may take before taking action yourself to resolve your individual dispute.

General information

Our website provides information about your rights as a consumer and information about consumer and competition law. Please take a look at our guidance for consumers, businesses, and regulated industries.

Complaints about the Commission

If we receive complaints about the Commission, the complaint will be read, logged and assigned to a manager to answer. The manager will make contact with the complainant, and may seek further information.

Please see the Complaints Policy for how we handle complaints about us.