Low compliance costs for most companies since start of Do Not Call Registry

MOST companies have not had to incur any costs in checking the Do Not Call Registry.

Four in five companies have checked 500 numbers or less since the registry came into effect on Jan 2 last year, and hence have stayed within the 500 free annual credits available to organisations and individuals with an account in the registry, said the Personal Data Protection Commission on Wednesday.

These credits were given to help them, in particular small and medium enterprises, reduce their compliance costs.

Some 90 per cent of all number checks have been conducted by one per cent of organisations, with 0.2 per cent checking more than 10 million numbers and incurring over S$25,000 each month to do so. These are mainly from the banking, telecom and insurance sectors, as well as third party aggregators.

The other 0.8 per cent spends S$2,500 monthly to check between 800,000 and 10 million numbers.

A separate poll that the commission conducted of over 100 companies in December, including 35 SMEs that relied on telemarketing practices, showed that most that did not rely heavily on telemarketing have spent less than S$5,000 to set up policies and practices to comply with the new directive. Those that did have spent mostly on IT systems or software.