Our energy compliance and enforcement priorities

Our compliance and enforcement objectives

Our compliance and enforcement work will focus on ensuring trust in the energy market. We are focusing on ensuring:

• customers experiencing vulnerability are protected from disconnection and accumulating debt
• customers affected by family violence are treated with respect and not subject to actions within the control of energy businesses that may endanger them
• energy businesses are deterred from disconnecting customers when they were not entitled to, or if they have not followed the relevant rules
• when businesses break the rules that regulate the market, they are held to account
• we are informed of the current state of the market.

Our priorities

To achieve these objectives our proactive compliance and enforcement work will focus on these priority areas:

• payment difficulty framework
• family violence protections
• wrongful disconnections of customers
• planned interruptions, especially affecting customers with life support equipment
• the transfer of customers without explicit informed consent
• overcharging of vulnerable customers, especially affecting those on concession entitlements or in payment difficulty
• embedded networks.

These priorities take several factors into account including:

• the risk of customer or market harm
• market intelligence including information and data we receive from industry, the community sector, the ombudsman and the broader community
• the external environment and how it interacts with the delivery and consumption of electricity and gas services.

Our approach

We will take a multifaceted approach to promoting customer protections under the energy rules. This will involve:

• education initiatives for both energy businesses and customers
• monitoring and analysis of data
• auditing energy businesses systems and processes
• compliance and enforcement actions
• reforming the energy rules and advising government
• referring conduct to other agencies.