NATIONAL ASSOCIATIONS OF QUALIFIED ACCOUNTANTS OF COMMERCIAL EXPERTS AND OF ACCOUNTANTS (Conclusion of investigation)
PRESS RELEASE
The Antitrust finds against the National Associations of Qualified Accountants, Commercial Experts and Accountants for a series of agreements on professional tariffs
The Italian Antitrust Authority has concluded an investigation of the National Associations of Qualified Accountants, of Accountants and of Commercial Experts, arriving at the conclusion that, the respective tariffs relative to their professional services as well as the recommendation from the Association of Accountants and Commercial Experts was encouraging its members to apply these tariffs before they were officially accepted by the public authorities and, finally, that the coordinated policy put in place by the two national associations to make prices of the two professional categories uniform constitute agreements restricting competition and so are in violation of Art. 2, Paragraph 2 of Law No. 287/90.
The point of departure was the statement, which can be considered as neutral from a competition point of view, that these professionals may be qualified as companies and that their respective associations are associations of companies. It was found by the Authority that these National Associations moving from that beginning, following what was for them a standard process, went well beyond the consultive role which they had been granted by the law.
In fact it was from within the National Associations that the choice to set prices for services was taken. Then they defined the structure and classification of the professional services, as well as their content, the limits within which they could be applied and the relative fees to be charged. Once complete, they proceeded to furnish a qualitative and quantitative chart to the public authorities, before these authorities had concluded their deliberations and fixed the levels of fees.
This behaviour of the two National Associations, of elaborating and defining fees constitutes a clear demonstration on their part of wanting to coordinate the behaviour of their members as concerns the fees to be charged for precisely defined professional services. The agreement has determined an increase in the fee set for the average service offered by the two professional groups and has had a limiting effect on one of the main items consumers use in choosing their service provider, the price of these services in fact pricing is one of the principle competitive strategies a company can use.
As regards the Association of Accountants and Commercial Experts, it was discovered they did not even wait for the formulation of the fees by the authorities, but formally invited the members to apply the fees they were proposing and distributed a printed price-list, automatically putting in place a price-fixing agreement for its members, before and quite independently of any decision by the public authorities.
Finally the investigations also turned up evidence that even as early as 1990 the two National Associations put in place a collaboarative relationship whose aim was to unify the two prices. This collaboration took place through the continuous exchange of information, meetings and corrispondence. This collaboration has led to a decision recently taken by the Association of Accountants and Commercial Experts, in agreement with the Association of Qualified Accountants, to abandon their original price-list, which differed in its formal outline and in its substance from that of the qualified accountants, and then to present a price-list identical with that of the qualified accountants.
The Antitrust Authority has prohibited the National Association of Qualified Accountants and the National Association of Accountants and Commercial Experts from ever in the future any similar agreements.