The story in Times of Malta on November 4 about the consumer watchdog is disturbing at many levels. The Consumer Claims Tribunal has received 10,000 complaints since 2008. Given the huge amount of retail business, this is certainly just a fraction – but it is alarming that so many names keep cropping up again and again.

There is clearly something wrong, but the problem is multifaceted.

The tribunal handles claims of up to €3,494, an utterly random amount based on the Lm1,500 of pre-euro days. The tribunal hears both sides and if the service or product provider is guilty or negligent, it sets the level of redress.

The consumer then has to get the trader to cough up the money. If they fail, then it is up to them to take the trader to court to get the decision enforced.

Because whereas in the past the tribunal was obliged to take legal action against traders who ignored its decisions, this no longer applies after the 2011 merger of the Malta Standards Authority and the Consumer and Competition Division. It is a huge step backwards.

So, we have a tribunal which cannot enforce its own decisions and which is not even obliged to try to do so.

Consumers will be happy to know that the court fees for such cases are halved. But there is not much else for them to cheer.

What can the Malta Competition and Consumer Affairs Authority do? The only tool available to it is naming and shaming.

The tribunal has always published the claims and decisions – but who is going to scroll through lists of hundreds of traders before they actually purchase anything? And in any case, if a consumer finds the trader on the list, he does not know whether the decision was enforced or whether they ignored it.

There is another figure which is even more worrying than the 10,000. It is one that the tribunal apparently does not have: How many defaulters are there?

Part of the problem is that there is no feedback system, so the tribunal is often not informed by the customer as to whether the decision was respected or not.

The authority is now taking steps to try to plug the gap between its decision and its enforcement by making it mandatory for the consumer to let the Office for Consumer Affairs know if the decision of the tribunal or the court is not honoured within 10 days. If it is not honoured, the company could find itself on the rogue’s gallery.

The authority website has a warnings section where serial defaulters are profiled.

The fact that a warning about Fantasy Tours was posted in October last year says a lot about the public awareness of this page. How many consumers were bitten by it going bust because they had never seen that warning?

But this will still not be enough. The information will need to be used effectively. There should be an alphabetical list of defaulters, for example, and it should be disseminated through the media.

It will then be up to the consumer to keep a look-out for defaulters, for the media to disseminate the warnings, and then, and perhaps only then, will traders actually realise that they stand to lose a lot more in the long-term than the refund they are digging in their heels about.