British companies could be underestimating the impact of e-business
regulations on their organisation's competitiveness, according to
IT experts.
A MORI survey of company leaders, commissioned by the CBI for its
conference last week, looked at business attitudes towards
regulation and red tape.
Some 95% said regulation increased over the past five years, 89%
expect it to increase further over the next five years and 80% said
this was damaging to their business.
However, out of the 256 chairmen, chief executives and other senior
directors questioned across a range of UK companies, an
overwhelming majority (72%) said the impact of e-business
regulations on the competitiveness of their business is
neutral.
"They are in cloud-cuckoo-land," said David Roberts, chief
executive of Tif, the Corporate IT Forum.
Companies undertaking e-commerce face a range of legal obligations.
They include data protection issues of e-commerce, Distance Selling
Regulations and Electronic Commerce Regulations to avoid consumers
being able to cancel their online contracts.
"The implications of legislation such as the Data Protection Act
are obviously not clearly understood. Businesses are also obliged
to store e-mail information which can be taken for the equivalent
of a contract," said Roberts.
Colin Beveridge, IT industry expert, agreed: "I suspect that
companies don't really understand e-business regulations," he said.
"More and more European regulations are about how people trade on
the Web. The survey results suggest that many businesses have made
no attempt at compliance with regulations."
Mike Pullen, Internet lawyer at Dibb Lupton Alsop, said: "Companies
have got a legal obligation to comply with these regulations. An
awful lot are not complying, for example with distance selling
regulations. If companies are playing by the rules it can affect
their competitiveness as other companies take advantage by not
obeying the rules."