The CCP wants to know Kolkostruva in stores, but the NSI won't give it

The Commission for Consumer Protection (CCP) is awaiting permission from the National Statistical Institute (NSI) to start publishing daily prices of goods and services from the large consumer basket. The reason is that some of the goods on the list are also monitored by the Institute, which is not authorized to disclose information about them publicly.

According to the latest amendments to the Law on the Introduction of the Euro, the CCP must create and maintain a publicly accessible internet portal on which it will publish the individual retail prices of goods from the large consumer basket on a daily basis.

On Tuesday, it became clear that the name of the portal is kolkostruva.bg, and it will publish information on prices from those retailers who do not have their own websites.

This portal was first mentioned back in June, when, in response to a question from Economic.bg, the current chair of the Commission, Maria Filipova, said:

The portal is ready, but at the moment, food chains are not cooperating and are not providing information for reasons that are not clear.“

The saga with the large food chains continued throughout the summer, with regulators trying in every way to get them to provide information about their prices. It got to the point where the Commission for Protection of Competition (CPC) asked the NSI directly for the data in question in order to conduct its sectoral analysis of the market for basic foodstuffs, even though Chapter 6 of the Statistics Act prohibits the Institute from disseminating or providing "data that could be linked in such a way as to identify a specific statistical unit.“

This turned out to be one of the reasons why the NSI was unable to maintain the portal in question, as was the original idea, and the responsibility for this was transferred to the CPC.

Despite the availability of expertise and tools for price monitoring, the chairman of the NSI, Assoc. Prof. Atanas Atanasov, has repeatedly emphasized that the Institute has no legal basis to publish or maintain an internet platform with specific, final sales prices of goods,“ the CPC said.

As a reason, Assoc. Prof. Atanasov cited restrictions in European legislation that do not allow such a portal to be administered.

Now, the CPC states that the portal in question is ready, and that the CPC is working with Information Services AD to create it.

The aim is for consumers to have access to up-to-date information on price movements, which will ensure awareness and transparency during the introduction of the euro,“ the regulator added.

To facilitate business, the CPC has developed detailed guidelines specifying what price information and in what form traders should provide to the CPC for publication on the price portal. Part of these guidelines is a list of goods from the large consumer basket. It is precisely this list that the NSI has expressed "categorical written disapproval" of, as some of the items are also monitored by the NSI.

As far as the list contains goods that are monitored by the NSI, its approval by the national statistics authority is a key condition for the launch of the portal,“ the CPC explains.

The list has now been edited and is awaiting approval by the NSI.

Once the coordination procedure has been finalized, the guidelines and the list will be sent to businesses, and traders will have to start providing the price information, which the CPC will publish on the kolkostruva.bg portal.

Translated with DeepL.