Violation receipt

By Egay Uy

THE City Price Coordinating Council conducted a surprise inspection of Christmas lights that are being displayed and sold in various retail outlets in the city. The purpose is to ensure that what the consumer would buy is compliant with importation and safety regulations.

This is an annual program of the DTI and the CPCC as a means of making consumers aware and conscious of the safe kind of Christmas lights. It may be worth noting that when the CPCC first coordinated with the DTI in 2014, we had to use a road roller to destroy confiscated items.

Over the years, the number of confiscated items has decreased significantly such that for the past two years, the DTI and the CPCC only used scissors to destroy and dispose of them. Hopefully, no confiscations will be made this year which means the items sold by retailers are already fully compliant.

The CPCC is collaborating with the DTI to give meaning to their mandate of “consumer protection.”

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The City Government will start this month the use of its Ordinance Violation Receipts. These are akin to citation tickets issued for traffic violations. The OVR will be issued to those caught violating city ordinances.

For the Regulatory Compliance Board, for instance, the OVR will be used by the Inspectorate Team for violations found committed by regulated entities. Those to whom the OVR is issued are given seventy-two hours within which to pay the administrative fine at the City Treasurer’s Office, otherwise, a criminal case for violation of a city ordinance will be filed before the public prosecutor’s office.

For starters, the OVR will be used by the police officers and regulatory offices of the city government such as the RCB and the Clenro. This may be considered as a dry-run before the OVR will be made available to other regulatory offices and to those who may be deputized later.

Those to whom the OVR will be issued are advised to provide their mobile phone numbers, if applicable, to facilitate communicating with them before the criminal case will be filed when there is a failure to settle the fine within 72 hours, and.

So the public may know.

(Egay Uy is a lawyer. He chairs the City’s Regulatory and Complaint Board, co-chairs with the city mayor the City Price Coordinating Council, and chairs the city’s Joint Inspection Team.  He retired as a vice president of Cepalco.)