If you can’t back it up, don’t say it

You may not know it but it’s illegal in New Zealand to make a claim about a good or service without reasonable grounds for doing so at the time that the claim is made.

Which is why we may ask you to provide evidence to substantiate (prove) your claims before approving your commercial.

The Commerce Commission provides the following advice for businesses:

• don’t make claims that you don’t have reasonable grounds for believing to be true
• rely on facts, figures and credible sources of information, not guesses and unsupported opinions
• keep documentation or other information that you have gathered in the process of sourcing or researching a good or service
• you must have reasonable grounds for claims at the time they are made; substantiating a claim after it was made may not get you off the hook.
  

Find out more about the substantiation provisions of the Fair Trading Act.