Procedural Powers in Competition Enforcement: A Look at Inspections

Abstract

Competition enforcement is characterised by asymmetric information and Competition Authorities have been provided with inspection powers to reduce the informative gap. The paper looks at competition inspections from different perspectives. First of all, the paper analyses convergences of principles and divergences of rules between different competition systems starting from two wide analyses carried out by the European Competition Network in 2012 and by the International Competition Network in 2013. Secondly, it tries to look at competition inspections from the point of view of undertakings, especially describing the practice of adopting Guidelines and internal rules for giving instructions to be followed during a competition inspection but also mentioning the costs of inspections, the duty of undertakings to cooperate during inspections (and sanctions for non-compliance) and – finally – the limits to the same power of inspection.Moreover, the point of view of Competition Authorities has been taken into account, with particular regard to the questions of planning inspections, administrative capacity in performing inspections and international cooperation in competition inspections.