Business Blog
Working Better Together Volume One: Advancing Both Consumer Protection and Antitrust Enforcement to Protect all Americans from Corporate Bad Actors
The FTC was created to act as a guardian of fair markets, armed with broad authority to ensure our economy is one in which consumers, workers, and honest businesses can thrive.
Chair Khan is committed to realizing that vision of an agency that takes on problems holistically, rather than from a consumer protection or competition lens alone. This means ensuring that the Commission’s two enforcement bureaus – the Bureau of Competition and the Bureau of Consumer Protection – are working hand-in-hand to root out marketplace abuses.
To help realize this vision, we are jointly rolling out organizational and training reforms so that the FTC can act as a unified agency. Our first initiative is to improve the information flow across Bureaus from information gleaned via Hart-Scott-Rodino Act (“HSR”) filings. HSR filings provide a vital window into the merger and acquisition activities of major corporations, and it is important that consumer protection staff investigating unfair or deceptive practices are aware if a company they are investigating makes an HSR filing. Similarly, competition staff reviewing a merger should be aware of any open investigations of unfair or deceptive practices by merging parties.
We are now putting in place a process by which basic HSR filing information will be regularly and timely shared between the Bureaus, while also protecting the statutory confidentiality of HSR information. We hope this new process will improve the information flow between the Bureaus. This represents the first step in ongoing efforts to ensure that we are acting as one agency, deploying all of our tools to ensure that markets are competitive and fair.
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