The legislature decided to differentiate between the liability to be borne by celebrities and members of the general public for endorsing false advertising when it passed an amendment to the Fair Trade Act (公平交易法) yesterday.
According to the amendment, the compensation a member of the public can be forced to pay to consumers seeking redress from the former’s false endorsement may not exceed 10 times the payment the endorser received from the advertiser.
The Legislative Yuan had passed another amendment to the act in June demanding that endorsers — whether celebrities or members of the public — be held liable jointly with advertisers for damages arising from endorsement they give when they know or are able to know that their views are misleading.
However, the move was criticized by Netizens, who said that the rule was unfair to endorsers from the general public — such as bloggers — whose realm of influence is narrower compared with that of celebrities.
“It is a widely accepted practice in other countries that even general members of the public are required to reveal that they are paid to give their endorsements,” said Sun Lih-chyun (孫立群), spokesman for the Fair Trade Commission.
“Since the law did not require the revelation of this information, it is reasonable to impose civil liability on general endorsers so that they would be responsible for their endorsement,” Sun said.
To prevent price-fixing, the legislature also passed an amendment stating that businesses which seriously violate the law may face a fine of up to 10 percent of their sales revenues in the previous year, instead of the regular fine of a maximum of NT$25 million (US$830,000) or a maximum of NT$50 million for repeat offenders.
It also approved an amendment to Tax Collection Act (稅捐稽徵法) extending the deadline for pursuing tax evaders who ran up more than NT$500,000 in arrears by five years to March 4, 2017.
Had the amendment not cleared the legislature, the treasury stood to lose NT$126.3 billion by March 5 next year.
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