Government especially CASE should not be abetting any of its
Government-linked companies like NETS who attempted to increase its
fees due to inefficiencies or monopoly.
This kind of monopolistic price increases has happened all too
often. It is about time some government ministers form a committee
to look into such monopoly which is bad for economic
competitiveness or business.
There is a possibility too of an infringement being committed under
the Fair Trading Act where cartels and collusions in price hikes or
profiteering have been prohibited by law.
Instead of keeping tight-lipped about such monopolistic price
increases by GLCs and government agencies, the government should
investigate whether there is justification for NETS to use its
monopoly to fix or increase prices which is against public or
national interest.
If businesses can be prosecuted for unfair trading practices
against the public or consumers, shouldn't government linked
companies be similarly brought to book for infringements like price
fixing or profiteering under the Fair Trading Law.
Should the public or end users be protected or should they be been
cornered into paying unfair price increases under the monopoly of
any sorts as NETS has enjoyed with the support of the government
and its agencies.
First the government should look into the quality and level of
service of NETS as a monopoly before even considering its reasons
for one-sided increases of fees.
I could recall one incident some three years ago when I had the
occasion to use NETS service to install a car park cash card
system.
After the promises and signing on the dotted lines, the NETS system
was installed but was found to be malfunctioning without any
attempts to fix the problems.
Eventually through trial and error by the layman staff, the car
park cash card system's malfunction was traced to incompatibility
of CPTs being used.
No one from NETS was bothered enough to attend to the problem. The
blame was quickly put on the faulty CPTs as being caused by some
imperfect manufacturing process.
Why with so many engineers in charge was there no one able to
prevent or preempt such manufacturing defects causing days of
disruption to the whole cash-card car park system and great
inconvenience to the public.
Because of such inefficiencies caused by monopoly status of NETS
customers had to suffer in silence. Complaints written to its
directors were ignored.
So if NETS were to say its increases were necessary to cover its
higher costs of operations, the above-mentioned incident should
offer an insight into how such higher costs had occurred -
inefficiencies of operations and management due to monopoly.
Obviously hidden inefficiencies were not resolved as shown in its
inability to take care of simple manufacturing quality check. Such
inefficiencies inevitably due to monopoly are being passed back to
the customers and end users by NETS because of lack of competition
or supervision.
