The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has launched an online Business Product Safety Complaint portal, harnessing market forces and private sector knowledge to improve consumer safety. We have long advocated for a formal and centralized trade complaint process at CPSC. This new portal will provide firms, importers, and other market participants an opportunity to alert the Commission to dangerous or violative products more easily.
We worked with CPSC staff to create this portal based on a roundtable meeting we held with stakeholders in Utah in February 2022. In that roundtable and others like it, we heard the frustration of firms that are forced to compete against unscrupulous market participants who seek unfair advantage by skirting mandatory safety requirements. Businesses often find out about unsafe products before the Commission, and they have every incentive to alert regulators about competitor products. Until now, they have not had a convenient mechanism to do so.
The Commission has long had an option for consumers to report dangerous products through saferproducts.gov. Now there is a similar outlet specifically for the business community. This portal will allow CPSC access to timely market intelligence and will serve as a force multiplier in our safety efforts. It is our hope that the business community will embrace this new tool and Commission staff will use these reports to make safety assessments and take appropriate enforcement actions. We look forward to meeting with more stakeholders to hear additional ideas on how the Commission can do better. No one has a monopoly on good ideas.
We encourage businesses to report violative or otherwise unsafe products to the Commission using the Business Product Safety Complaint portal here.