 Okay, I think I'm going to go ahead and get started, everyone, good afternoon. Today we'll be talking about the fast track process, and I should probably stop and make sure everyone can hear me. Is anybody having trouble hearing me? Okay. Today we'll talk about the fast track process, recalls in general with the CPSC. I'm Tanya Topka. I'm a compliance team lead with the fast track team, and I'm joined by Mr. Michael Delnegrove, and he's senior counsel at GE. I will start off the panel with a discussion about the recall process. Fast track process and reporting under section 15. It's a very nuts and bolts down in the details presentation. And Mr. Delnegrove will provide a valuable insight into the fast track process from a company perspective. We'll provide plenty of time for questions after the presentations are finished, so once we both are finished, we'll go ahead and answer the questions. We're hoping to have about 10 or 15 minutes for questions, so there should be plenty of time. And I also want to just let everyone know if you see me sitting and standing and moving up around, I injured my back. So I'll be squirming around as we get through this. Just want to excuse myself in advance so I don't look strange as we go through this. So as I discussed on the agenda, for myself, we'll be reporting under section 15, conducting a fast track recall, conducting a recall that's not a fast track, and monitoring recalls. Reporting under section 15. This covers both fast track and non-fast track cases. And affirm if they want to submit a report under section 15, they can elect to select fast track. If they do not check the box for fast track, it'll remain a non-fast track case. We encourage reporting under section 15 on our website or via email to the section 15 mailbox. And in a moment, I'll show you where you can go onto our website to start the process of filing a section 15 report. We prefer this electronic method because it's faster. It's easier for us to track and route it to the correct person. And you can also add photos and other documents to the online report and, of course, to emails if you send them to us. So it's really a great way for you to report to us. Much better than a phone call. On our website, on the right-hand side, you'll see something that says businesses. And I will show you that in a minute where you'll be able to see that. Or, of course, you can send an email to our section 15 at cpsc.gov mailbox. And I hope that shows up enough for everyone in the back with the blue. And we do discourage reporting via the telephone mail letter effects. It's just much slower. Of course, it's much harder for us to track. And it's much, much easier to get lost or duplicated during routing. You don't want multiple people calling you about the same report. And so here you'll see on our webpage, on the right-hand side, report an unsafe product. And if you click on businesses, it will take you to this screen. If you're already a registered business, you go ahead and sign in and submit your report. If you're not a registered business, you can report without registering. So either way, you can submit a report to us. You don't have to be a registered business. What to provide when reporting to get all that information together? For an initial report, details about the product, stop sale date if you have that available, potential defect and hazard, or issue if you prefer to use that word, samples and all available information that you have. A full report should contain all the information, one through 15, as listed in the CFR for a full report. A customer list, your proposed corrective action plan, which we call a cap. Notice documents, anything you have drafted up as far as letters or any notice that you're going to be doing direct to consumers, posters, all those information should be part of that. Draft press release, test reports, a list of foreign countries the product was sold to. And we do routinely do joint recalls with Health Canada. So that information is very valuable to us, especially if it was sold in Canada. And then the reverse logistics disposal plan, which I'll talk about later on in the presentation and explain that for anyone who doesn't know what reverse logistics is. The compliance lead will assign the report once they receive it to someone on their team. And contact should be made within 24 hours, especially on fast track cases. So if you don't hear within 24 to 48 hours, please contact us and let us know. And hopefully we can figure out where it is and what's going on with it. What is the fast track program? It was initiated in 1995, and it eliminates the preliminary determination of hazard for cases reported by a firm that can quickly implement a recall. And I like to refer to it because I'm the cheerleader of the fast track program as a win-win-win. Everyone wins in this scenario. The firm avoids getting a preliminary determination so they don't have some piece of paper saying that there's something wrong with their product from the government. And they can implement a recall quickly and move on to the next thing. The staff expends less resources. They don't have to investigate if there is a problem. They just go straight to how do we fix that problem. And of course the public gets quicker notice. So and that's the goal for everyone is to get the notice out to the public as quickly as possible. Now what is the fast track program? What do you have to do? The firm must do public notice and initiate a stop sale quickly. So if you're going to do a fast track, you must do public notice. You have to get the notice out to the public. The firm can do a repair, a replacement, or a refund is a corrective action. Those are your three options. And of course the staff will review or repair replacement proposals before they're implemented. We'll have our technical staff review them. And we have engineers, human factor specialists. We have health scientists. Whoever we need to help us evaluate that program. And of course the firm must still provide a full report and all requested information for a fast track recall. I know sometimes people think if it's a fast track recall, you don't need a full report. We still do. We still need all that information to help us be able to do an effective recall. Ways to reach the public about a recall. Our number one is of course getting a toll free hotline so people can contact the company with questions or to get the recall remedy. Posters at traditional retail locations. And one of the things that we really like is seeing them in several different locations, if that's possible with the retailer. Recently I was walking out of a retailer and I won't name their name even though it's a good thing. And right there in front of the door was the recall that I had negotiated. And they had it on a sticky right on the door. And I thought, wow, that's really great. As I'm walking out the door, you can't miss that recall notice. Forums, trade associations, magazines for the industry, brochures, catalogs. Think if you're a specialty group, especially population, you make something maybe for the construction industry. But it can also be used in the home use. You might want to think about, look again to do-it-yourself magazines or things where you can advertise that recall in publications where people would most likely see it if they're using the product. And of course, we always say direct notice is best. If you have the names, emails, addresses, phone numbers of the consumers that you have, it's always best to get the notification out to them. And of course, we encourage anybody, whether they're the recalling company, whether they're a retailer that's participating in the recall, to search through. They're loyalty cards. They're warranty registrations or catalogs to try to find information to get direct notice out. Additional ways to reach the public about a recall. The website, recently we've been having a lot of companies do online registration for recalls. And I think this is a benefit. It cuts down on the telephone traffic that is coming into the company for the hotline once the recall gets started. And also, let's consumers go on at their leisure. They don't have to call between the business hours of the hotline. They can go on when they get home and they're busy. Working mom just goes in and it's 10 o'clock at night and she's doing the online registration for the recall. So I think it's a great feature if you can incorporate that into your recall. And then, of course, putting the instructions if there's a recall repair on the website. That's another thing that we've found to be really beneficial that companies are starting to do, showing step-by-step instructions and putting them on along with the recall notice on their website. Social media is another big thing that has taken off in the past year. And we're encouraging companies, if they have a Twitter page or a Facebook or Google+, or blogs that they use routinely to get in touch with their consumers, to notify them via that medium of a recall when those recalls come up. And we do encourage companies to use their social media platforms whenever possible. And of course, CPSC, if you've done a recall with us in the past year, you know we've started routinely using Twitter. Pretty much every press release that we've put out recently has, we've tweeted. Hopefully, I'm using the language correctly. I'm not hip on the Twitter. And then, YouTube. A lot of companies recently, if they have a complicated or a repair program that is step-by-step and you have to follow the instructions, and it's really something that would be beneficial seeing it visually, they've been making videos and putting it on YouTube. And then, of course, in their recall information, linking to that YouTube video so consumers can go onto YouTube and see the repair being done in front of them. And that also helps out in just getting that recall repair done correctly. Choosing a remedy. Refund will always say, especially on my team, the Fast Track team, that refunds are the way we would like everything to be done. They're the fastest or the easiest method for consumers. You must consider if the product will be returned and how it'll be returned. Some options, if it's a large item, is removal of a piece that can disable a product and be returned at a lower cost. Prepaid postage return for consumers. We don't want consumers having to pay to return the product to get a refund. And if it's not returned, you have to consider what will be acceptable for you in form, it could be a form that's signed by the consumers to get their refund or some other document that you would have if you're not going to have the product return back to you by the consumers. Replacement. The replacement must be a comparable product, both in price and in what it offers. You don't want to have a recall on a toy and then give a replacement for a high chair. I mean, it has to be something comparable so they're getting essentially a very comparable product. It does require that CPSC staff review the test reports and data that you have for that product. If you have a lot of incident reports or warranty claims on that product, we'd want to see that before we would consider approving it. Repair programs always need staff review. And of course, we'll have our engineers look at that information. The repair program can be done by a consumer. It can be done by a technician if you're going to pay for a technician to go out and do it. And in some cases, I'm thinking of some of the products that you sell, where you're going to need a technician to go out there. It's just too complicated for a consumer repair. Or it can be returned to the firm and have the repair done there and then return back to the consumer. If it is done by the consumer, we really are looking for a repair that is easy with clear instructions that a consumer can follow. If there are tools, they should be provided. Requiring power tools, we can't say that every consumer is going to have a power screwdriver in their house to be able to make a repair. So if there is something small like it needs a wrench, you can include a small wrench in with the repair kit so a consumer can be able to do that repair. Press releases. Press releases, and next I'll talk about recall alerts and just make the distinction between the two. Press releases are for recalls where there is no ability to do direct notice or very little ability to do direct notice. And you're really needing that outreach. You're trying to reach out to the consumers. And a majority of our recalls are press releases because the consumers can't be contacted and they don't know where the end users are. It can be pitched to the media, most likely will be. It can be highlighted on CPSC's main page, and a lot of them are. And of course, routinely tweeted, but I'll say almost every single press release is being tweeted as of now. And they can be embargoed. And embargoed is something where we release it the night before, but that media outlet that we release it to cannot release the information or print the story out until the following day. And of course, if it is embargoed, we will let you know about that as soon as we possibly can the day before. Recall alerts, this is a very small percentage of the recalls that we do. It still gets posted on CPSC's website, just like that the press release would be. And it does require direct contact for virtually all consumers, retailers and distributors. And you have to provide us with a customer list to be able to verify that you have that information to us. How to speed up the recall process. A lot of companies come to me and ask me, what can I do to speed up the recall process? I just, I feel like it's just not going fast enough for me. So I put together a few ways that we have found on our end that will help speed up the process for companies. The first is reporting electronically online or via the section 15 mailbox. If you mail in a report and it takes us a week or a week and a half to get that report in through the mail, you've already lost a week, a week and a half in your recall process. So reporting electronically and emailing that information is perfectly acceptable. We actually, if you don't send it to us electronically, we've got to scan it in so we have an electronic copy of it anyway. So you're saving us a step by sending it in to us electronically. Provide all required and requested information and please don't ask us to give you each missing item, going down through the list and saying, okay, you're missing this thing, you're missing this item, you're missing this item through the full report. Because of course that slows down the process. Provide the full report information electronically, going back to that. And if you can in numbered format, just kind of follow the questions down one through 15. And so then we don't have to try to match it up from a narrative. Surprisingly, that speeds up the process as well. Provide samples, test reports and engineering documents for repair replacement programs early on in the process for staff review. The sooner we get those samples in the test reports or engineering documents, the sooner we can get them over to our technical staff for them to begin the review. Provide the press release to us in word format, not PDF. We can't have the, our communications office can't move the document around in a PDF. So we need it in word format to be able to move it around and go back and forth with the different draft versions of it. Provide high quality JPEG photos of the product. Respond promptly to technical questions as they come up once that PSA process has started or our engineers are reviewing the fix or the replacement. And then of course, if there's issues or any problems that come along in the process, flag those to the compliance team lead. They're probably in the best position to be able to be the frontline for you and say is there something going on here and we miss something, does something get hung up? Maybe somebody's out of the office and they can help try to get those issues resolved for you. And I'll have the contact information for the team leads at the end of the slide. Reverse logistics. Basically, the reverse logistics process is the reverse of distribution. It's how your products get returned back to you. If it's at the retail level, how the retailers are pulling that product from the shelves, what they're doing with it, where they're putting it and how it's getting back to wherever you want it to go. It could also be that the retailers are destroying it on site and how they're documenting that destruction. And when you submit a plan to us that involves destruction or return of products, it should talk about how the products are quarantined where they're gonna be quarantined at in a warehouse at the back of a store. Are you gonna keep these in the back of Target or Walmart or are you gonna send them to the DC centers? How those products will get returned not only from the retail level but from the consumer level or consumers milling those products back into the firm. Are they taking them to the retailer to have those returned back and getting their refund? And then of course, just very very distinct description of any repairs that are gonna be done, say by the retailer or if you're gonna put a repair kit inside of a product, how that's all gonna take place is really helpful to us in being able to understand what's gonna take place and to figure out if that process is gonna be acceptable or not. And you should provide your reverse logistics plan to the compliance staff along with your corrective action plan, they kind of go hand in hand with each other and it helps us know exactly what's gonna happen once the recall starts. It is a very important process to plan out to avoid having recalled products back into distribution and of course it's illegal to sell recalled products so I think is a company you'd wanna make sure you have that plan hashed out so that doesn't happen. And again, tracking is the biggest thing. We need to know where your products are gonna be at all times just like you need to know where your products are gonna be all times. If something were to happen and products are coming back at least we would know what step in the process something went wrong and broke down in that chain. Recall monitoring, CPSC staff monitor all recalls and you must provide monthly progress reports via fax or email until the case is closed by staff. You can use the progress report form that's provided with the cap letter. And if you really want the electronic copy to be able to use it and type into it, compliance officers can provide that to you as well. And one of the main features on that reporting form that we've been looking at recently in recent years is the pre and post recall incidents. And it's really important for us to get an idea if the incidents were happening prior to the recall going out or if they happened after the recall went out. So we've broken out that section on the progress reporting form. We will check on implementation of the corrective action plan through onsite recall checks with the recalling company, retailers or consumers. We have done consumer recall checks where we'll contact them to find out if they've been made aware of the recall. And please notify compliance of any changes to the firm or to the corrective action plan. If you have a new point of contact, if you have a new address, new phone number, your hotline hours have changed. If you've filed for bankruptcy, if you've been purchased by a new company, so then we can go ahead and change and update that press release that's on our website as need be. And effective recalls. Really, if you find out that the recall or the corrective action that you're carrying out is appears to be not effective for whatever reason, the repair is not working, you're just not getting notice out to the people you want to, retailers weren't posting the posters, you really should notify compliance staff so we can come together and try to find a way to make that recall effective. We can seek additional notification if there are post-recall incidents, ineffective notification or low correction rates. And really, if we get started getting back a series of recall effective checks where the posters just weren't up at retailers, you're probably going to get a phone call from a compliance officer saying what's going on, how come these retailers weren't notified or how come they didn't put the posters up and we need to see if we need to send posters back out again. And of course, some of the things that we can do are renounce a recall, do additional forms of notification and one of the most successful things that I've done recently as a compliance officer were out of season recall group notification and it was basically a bunch of winter-related products that were recalled during the summer and spring months and so right before winter started, we took those out, there was a bunch of heaters and other things and lumped them out together, just reminding people that if they had these products, they were away in storage, you're pulling them back out again, the recall's coming out. So as we do those more in the future, you might get notification from us that we're gonna go back out again with this group notification for an out-of-season recall. Disposal, one of the things that you should be thinking about if your product has batteries or electronic components in there is if it needs special disposal. If you're instructing consumers to throw away a product, you need to know do they have to remove those batteries, recycle those batteries, do they need to go to a special disposal facility and it should be following federal, state and local laws. If retailers will be disposing or destroying of a product or if you're using a third party, you really should notify us and let us know. So we can plan for what might come up. If questions come up about this product is being sold and it was recalled, we know that that third party was responsible for the destruction. And before you destroy, dispose or recycle recalled products, we have a mailbox set up called RecallProductDisposal at CPSC.gov. And we ask that companies send in notification to us, give us enough of a window so we can get our field staff to go out and witness that destruction disposal recycling if need be or to make arrangements for getting an affidavit or get verification of the process. And like I said, as early as possible, if you could let us know so we can coordinate our field staff for that. For recall monitoring, if you would like to have the case closed from recall monitoring, you can send a request to compliant staff to close the formal monitoring of the recall case and once you do that, we will start the process of reviewing it to see if it should be closed and if it is, we'll send you out a letter letting you know. In the meantime, you should continue to provide monthly progress reports to us until you receive the closed letter from compliance. And of course, continue to honor recall requests for the remedy. If a consumer calls in and says, I wasn't aware of this recall and I saw that it was posted a year ago, you should still provide them with the remedy if possible. And of course, continue to post recall notification on the firm's website after the formal monitoring ends. And here I have a few examples of recall notification on websites that I wanted to show. I thought they were pretty good examples of being able to provide information to consumers about a recall. Here is the main page for a company and it shows that their bicycle recall is right here, front and center, and you click on it, it provides the recall information for this particular bicycle recall. This is a website for an ATV snowmobile and utility vehicle company. And I thought it was interesting that they list all of the recalls by date so you could go through and click on the recalls, find the date of the recall announcement, but they're all there going back to looks like 2006. Here is another one where they kind of keep a scrolling log of recall information and keeping that there so you can click on through it and then click on the recall information box. You can also pull up the information that way. So there's no one perfect way to do your website notice, but I think there are some really good examples from companies of how they've gone about doing it, but again, showing it to the compliance office you're working with as you go through the recall process will help you see if that's a really good way to post that information on your website. And here is the recall information, sorry, contact information. The first is the website for reporting to the CPSC and to get information about the recall process. The next is my contact information and then the other two team leads for the defects investigation group or Blake Rose and he deals with the fire electrical and mechanical products and Renee Wachabi who deals with the children's products. And I think I'll turn it over to you now. Okay. Okay, thanks. Went a little faster than I thought I was going to. I was trying to make up some time. What's that going to do? I think it will. I think it just caught on the table. Is that going to reach you? You can, why don't we sit down on the left there? Yeah. I'm going to move the mouse. There you go. Yeah. Is that that? Yeah, that's fine. Okay. Good. Yeah, we won't drop the government stuff on top of it. We're completely blocking the... Oh really? Yeah. Yeah. Let's see if I can move this over. Yeah, that's fine. You good? Yeah. You still got enough room? Yeah, it's going to challenge my... Okay, here we go. All right, thanks. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for being here. And I'm really delighted to be here with Tanya and to present today. So this is a pleasure. I think I know some of the compliance officers in the back. I assume you guys won't heckle me at some point appropriately. But first, I'll tell you, I have a social science background. Despite being a GE, I don't have any numbers in my pitch. So this is all sort of discussion that I thought would be useful, informative. I think about two-thirds of the people here are experts because they're with the staff. So they know how this works. So I've included some commentary that I thought would be fertile for discussion. And I guess if we have time, we can take some questions at the conclusion. And I'm going to be very brief. I'm going to be about 15 minutes. I called Dean before the panel. I said, look, I don't want to cover topics that'll be already reviewed. I knew that Tanya would cover the logistics and operation of a fast-track program. He said, what do you think I should cover? He said, well, GE is really a frequent user of the fast-track process. Give us your perspective on it. And I said, well, that's true. So I'll talk a little bit about our experience with it, good, bad, and different. And we'll leave time for questions. But so you just click on the roll now. Sorry. I'm going to cover three areas broadly. I'm going to cover what's necessary in our view for ensuring good coordination with the compliance staff. I'll talk a little bit about best practices, having done a number of voluntary recalls through the fast-track program, what works well, both in the planning phase and in the execution phase. And I want to talk a little bit at the end about commentary, including some of the stuff we were talking about beforehand, regarding the fast-track program, whether it's working as well as it should. There's an article for those of you who haven't read it in the product safety letter that came out in the summer that raised issues and some critique of the fast-track program. I'd like to kind of talk a little bit about that. And then we'll stop and leave time for questions. To me, the key element in the fast-track program is kind of giving the compliance officer what he or she wants and knowing what that is, without them having to come to you first. So once a business has made the decision to do a voluntary fast-track, I think it's largely helping a very overworked compliance officer understand what they need to do to move the file along to completion. So the best practice, these are very basic points, but organization, clear communication, transparency, timeliness, obviously, particularly if the staff is asking more input so that they can evaluate the merits of your corrective action or evaluate the potential hazard. And then the last point I think is really critical is anticipating what are gonna be timing issues and raise those to the compliance officer so that there's no surprises. Sometimes it's hard to do that, but I think that's a key ingredient. And I always like to sort of step back and look at what was the original intent of the program. And the original intent of the program, as I understand it, was to help, to quote, reward businesses who move faster in their corrective action to speed the process up overall. And all these elements are kind of directed at helping the staff achieve that objective. I'll talk a little bit later about how that's not feasible in every recall and every corrective action depending on the product, the supply chain issues and the execution of that. That's not always, the 20-day timeline is not always achievable. What I've heard, I don't know if this is from the latest annual report, but I think it's something like 95% of fast tracks are initiated within the 20-day timeframe. So despite some commentary to the contrary, it still seems to be living up to its original intent. The best practices, again, these are kind of obvious. I think most businesses who have a well-articulated safety program have these in place. If they don't, they should. But having a dedicated recall coordinator, and that might be somebody who deals not only with safety issues but quality programs. The way we do it at GE, and I'm here on behalf of GE Appliances at one of the GE sub-businesses, but we have in every recall team a coordinator who's usually a product manager who actually knows how product is sold and where the customers are, who acts as the person who herds cats and makes sure that everybody is in the tent who needs to be, and that includes overseeing the cross-functional team, which includes members from service and technology and communications and legal. It really does take a village to launch a recall, and if you don't have people who understand that this is a new process, once they're in the recall column, they really, it doesn't go well. So you have to be kind of a task master with deadlines and so on. And I'll tell you, my predecessors in the audience, Lee Bishop, so afterwards you can ask him how it's really done, because he was a GE for more than a decade. And he's gonna heckle too. I think the single biggest thing with compliance staff is to clearly communicate to be realistic in your expectation about what's deliverable, and if there are disruptions or changes that are unanticipated to explain why, transparently, to them. And I think that's probably true in any key relationship, but particularly when the compliance staff is under a time deadline or a manager who's saying, move faster, why haven't you gotten the business to launch their corrective action? And this last point of being able to anticipate and manage recall challenges, I mean, I'll give you one example of a recall challenge. You've agreed on your corrective action, you've said we need a new replacement component to address an electrical hazard in a product. You contact your supplier, they say, sure, we can deliver 10,000 widgets by a date certain. And you tell the compliance officer we're good to go, I think that launch window of whatever date will work. And then your supplier comes back and says, you know, we really didn't anticipate a problem and I don't know, a factor is under water and we're not gonna have the heart for you. So the next step is you call the compliance officer and you say, you know, we have a problem and I don't like the launch window and can we just move it? And that's sort of the bad way to do it, right? So I think laying out what's happened if you have correspondence to kind of share that but just make it very clear why you have a need to move the fast track. And that kind of leads me to the next point which is in terms of best practices, the latest recall handbook I think is very good. It has good guidance about the use of social media, GE uses social media now for its voluntary recalls. We've started doing that. And I like that businesses have the recall information on their branded website. There are some companies that don't do that. They put it on a sort of anonymous third party website. And I think it's important commercial information to convey to your consumers and your customers and it should be on a business's website. We do that. And in fact, we list all our recalls historically on our recall website. My point about customer coordination is when the fast track was initiated and it's sort of inaugural day, it anticipated that there might be some elasticity in the 20 day timing. And so although the intent of the program is to move quickly both from the company standpoint and from the compliance staff by making sort of a trade-off, there are certainly reasons, principal reasons that I think are okay to require more time both from the staff's perspective and from a business's perspective. And I'll talk about those in a second. But coordination with customers is one key element. It takes when you have a large and differentiated supply chain, it takes a while to get to your retailers and say, hey, this is coming. Do you have product on the floors? Let me talk to your safety or quality person, not just your buyer. Anyway, that takes time to do and sometimes doing that within the 20 day period and preparing to execute the recall is just, it's not feasible. The Washington Post featured an article, I think it's two years ago now about recall fatigue and there's been a lot of commentary about do we have too many recalls? You heard Mark say that we don't have a target, the commission doesn't have a target number. There are many, many sources of recall information, both the recalls.gov and Safer Products and many other sites too. You can get a mobile app now that features product recalls. A concern I always have is the hazard is a classic hazard if it's a significant risk to consumers. You don't want the fact that there's been another announcement to kind of not get people to act on it. So it's a real challenge. From my standpoint, I think a clear, technically accurate hazard description is very important, not one that's overstated, not one that's understated. And then I know that the staff, when they do a traditional section 15 recall where there is a preliminary determination, that they go through the sort of class ABC hazard assessment and this is sort of just food for thought, would it be useful in public announcements to say this is a class A recall? So the public knows this is one that's really requires urgent and imminent response from consumers. The FDA does that. They classify their recalls by severity, one class one, two or three. And I don't know if that would work in the consumer space, but that's just sort of a food for thought to help differentiate the message from a recall. Because right now I think the way the public perceives it is a recall is a recall is a recall. From our perspective, from GE's perspective, obviously we want to prioritize and address the highest risk recalls to promptly eliminate such hazards and talk a little about, I think, what are some of the key elements of that. So some of the challenges of the fast-track timing. Obviously the goal is launching within 20 working days of the report. As I mentioned, you have uncontrollable issues that come up. Suppliers in the service delivery network can present challenges. And it really depends on the complexity of your recall. For a 20,000 unit children's product recall where it's disposal of a product or refund, it's a lot easier to administer that than a repair of 1.3 million dishwashers, for example. And which gets me to my next point, which is the complexities of a more complex product. As your product is for electrical and mechanical products, the recall execution takes longer. It takes longer because you've got to make sure the remedy works to the satisfaction of the business and the compliance officer. Because I assure you that businesses don't want to have to go out and address an issue more than once, once they've made the correction in a consumer's home. And then what I described as getting to yes on the joint press release side. Here's sort of my view of the press release process. It's a negotiated process. It can add time to the finalization of the corrective action. And I think that's because both sides have their objectives for what's important in the press release. I'll share with you that in every case that we've done a voluntary recall since I've been there, we've gotten to yes. It's just sometimes take a little longer than you think you might think. And I think it requires both sides to be kind of reasonable in saying, here's what's really important, here's what we think is accurate in terms of describing the product and the hazard, and here's what we need to do to tell consumers how to take corrective action. But I always, I tell the compliance staff that I work with, I know we'll get to yes, it just may take a little twist and turns until we get there. And finally, I think the key to success is obviously being well organized, having clear and timely communication with compliance officers, not annoying them with frequent phone calls. But at the same time, if you have important information to exchange, making sure that you're doing that, and then transparency, they shouldn't have to be saying, well, why are you doing this or why aren't you doing this? And if you deliver kind of what you know that they'll need to close the file and move forward, then in theory, they don't need to be coming to too many detailed questions. So I'll stop there. And I think we've got time for... I think we have a lot of time for questions. Go ahead. Yep, I was, I'm a big cheerleader of the program. I was on a team that helped create the FastTrack program where I work for Ann Brown. And one of the things that we wanted to create was the two things, expediting calls, but also to create a center for companies to command and avoid the legal entanglement of preliminary determination. And I think one of the homeworks of FastTrack we call it flexibility. And if you can accomplish the goal of getting products off the shelves or out of consumer's hands and back to the, to get prepared, I think then you don't necessarily have to do a press release to the public. And I'll give you an example. I put in a recall with a high-end bicycle where there were 475 of the bikes out. They were like $7,000 frames. So, but the company had enlisted all their customers and the CAP we negotiated with compliance was that we can get letters and notify everybody that has one of these bikes and basically say if you send it back, it was a crack frame. And you can repair the crack frame and take care of the problem. And if you, in return, not necessarily have to jeopardize the brand of this bike by not putting out a public press release, is this, is this acceptable? And compliance at the time said, yes, it is because they accomplished the goal. So, so I think the point I'm trying to make is not always necessary to do a public release or a customer release. If you can accomplish the goal by at least with a direct mail result or getting the word out to the customers and accomplish the goal of getting it repaired. And I think that that should be an acceptable solution. And I just didn't know if you had had similar circumstances or you negotiated that kind of thing. Not in recent years. The direction that we've been given in compliance is that the press release or the recall alert, whichever it may be, is our kind of notification to the public of what we have done, or what we have negotiated with this firm. So it's more from information purposes of this is what we have negotiated with this firm, this is the transparency, here it is, you see it. And less of, you know, thinking about it from a punishment standpoint, but I get your point. But more of this is the documentation of what we are doing with this company. And so the public knows that we're not hiding recalls, there's not silent recalls. If somebody wants to know what the commission is doing with companies taking corrective actions, they can go on our website and find that action. And that's been, I think probably the direction for, I'm looking back at Blake here, but he's not giving me any clues with fingers hold up. But I wanna say at least four or five years, that's kind of been our direction of where we've been going. And sometimes it is a tough fight. I mean, in the circumstance you're talking about, you know, it's really hard sell to a company where they can pretty much take care of that notification themselves and convincing them that yes, we have to put this public record document on our website, you have to do it, you know. And so I think sometimes it leaves companies thinking, well, why did I call you in the first place? And we see that point, but unfortunately, our direction is that, you know, you have to have that notification on the website. So I think that's kind of my answer is that we would be posting notification regardless of how effective the recall is. But always telling companies that just means you're, you're not gonna have to do monthly progress reports for very long because it looks like you'll have it nailed right away by having such a good supply chain. But I think too, it's important for companies to know that that is the goal. The goal is to be able to have that kind of lockdown on your chain that you know exactly where those products are. And when something goes wrong, bam, I pull a switch and we can contact all these people right away and get them back as quickly as possible. And so, I mean, for me, when I see companies that can do that, I always think that's pretty amazing and I'm getting very excited. Let's hurry up and move on it. Because it's a great thing to be able to just pull that switch and get everyone notified, especially when you're having small numbers. Mr. Brown. I did have a question, Michael. It's a delight to have you here because I see stuff from one perspective and I'm curious about your perspective. What do you do when you've got information that there's something that's a problem with the product but you're not quite sure what it is? Or if you're pretty sure you know what the problem is, you're just not sure what a good fix would be. What's the decision-making process and at what point are you, as you're working through this, are you saying to yourself, I still gotta notify the CPSC even if I don't have the full outline of the corrective action plan. Maybe you guys are so good, you never have situations. But I'm just curious to see what you have. This is my softball question, thank you. No, it's a great question. Well, we have a process for evaluating field complaints and field reports. And at every step along the way, you've gotta evaluate whether you have potential reportable information. It doesn't matter if you have finalized root cause or a remedy. I can tell you in the corrective action that the business announced this year, I mean we've, historically we've been very careful in making sure that we understood what's needed for the elements of a corrective action. But there's not a requirement to wait until you have all those elements wrapped up. Obviously that's not the statute that you have to wait until you've completed a risk assessment even, right? So the commission's guidance is not to wait to that point. I think it's important to look at how the compliance staff would look at the issue and not have what I would call a failure of imagination to say, well, we have some confidence based on our testing and risk assessment of the product that this is not a significant risk, but could the compliance staff look at it differently? And we have a process in place to look at those kind of opportunities where our view, we believe is this is low risk and here's why. And that's usually based on testing, wiring and design guides and other things. But you always have to ask the question of whether something is potentially reportable. And that's, you know, we have a process that's key to that. Go ahead. In the event that there's a critical recall where I would say there have been fatalities or some associated, a company must move very quickly to pull that product out from marketplace. And if you ask for 15 pieces of information that might not really be available, is there a way that they can start the recall process without having all of that information? This is my trick question, isn't it? I will say for a refund program, I've got an answer that will solve that problem. For a repair replacement, not as easy, but probably a solution. For the refund program, it's really easy because if a company wants to get the notice out to consumers, they can send us a notification saying, here's what we plan to send out to consumers. Even if it's just a very early on, maybe you don't even know if you want to do a refund repair replacement yet. We can say, here's a notification you can send out to consumers. It can be very small details, basically saying there's something that we found with this product. We're going to do a recall. We're working with the CPSC to come up with a solution to the problem. We don't have the details of that yet, but we will have it at some point and you might give a date of when you think you might have it and we'll notify you again. And so we've worked with companies that have taken that type of approach. A lot of companies that have email addresses for their consumers, they're taking that type of approach. The problem is when you don't have contact information for your consumers, there's not a lot of options. I mean, do you post a poster at a retail location saying a recall's coming, but it's not here yet? I mean, so it makes it challenging when you don't have that contact information, especially if you're doing a refund program. It's almost so simple just to be able to say, go ahead and send out that notice. You're ready to go because there's nothing that we really need to approve as far as what you're gonna do for the remedy. For the repair and the replacement program, we have to do that approval of that program first before we can say, this is what you're gonna be doing. But we never have an objection to sending out notification to consumers saying, hey, here it's coming. Or to retailers, here something's coming. We just want you to know, please stop selling the product as soon as possible and more details will follow. Trying to think about it from a standpoint of not having that type of consumer information, I think you run into a lot of challenges of getting that message out there without having a lot of details to be able to say what we're gonna be able to do. But I think the initial notification is probably a good step. And I've worked with companies that have done a little postcards where it just, you know, because they knew that consumer, if they're gonna get two recall notifications may not take it seriously. So they'll just do a postcard saying, here's some information about this product. More will be coming via letter, expected during this time period. So there's all kinds of options that you can work out with a compliance officer. Trying to think of something that a company did recently on their website and how they warded it. But they basically went up on their website and said, we're stopping selling this product. It's gonna be pulled from the retail locations. We're working with the CPSC to come up with a solution to the problem, but at least notifying people via their website that something was coming. I don't think we'd be opposed to that either as long as we kind of had an idea of what you're saying to your consumers. Being able to work out some type of solution like that. Is that answer your question? Yeah. But I have a followup. What happens if a company decides not to go through the CPSC process for recalling a product? And I've seen this happen where a big warehouse membership store has got information on every consumer that bought a particular product that they think is unsafe. So they can contact each one of those directly. Do they absolutely have to go through that CPSC process? They do have a reporting obligation, and I'm not the attorney, so I'm not gonna even tread into those waters, but they do have a reporting obligation. And so if they have information to believe that there is an issue, a problem, a defect, a hazard, they should be notifying the commission. And so if we do find out that they've done a recall and haven't gone through the commission, they can be subject to civil penalties for failure to report or timeliness in their reporting. So we try to scare people with the civil penalties so they don't ever think about doing it. But really, a lot of companies, even if they have all that contact information, still are contacting us because they don't want that failure to report against them. But yeah, they do have an obligation report even if they think they can hammer it out like with the bicycles in two weeks and just have it ready to go and hammer it out. Still gotta report. I have a question, why some may get pressed so you can do the repair. Do you feel it's important? Why am I getting all the hard questions? I keep looking over at you like, are you gonna come in and jump in? We can get you a job here. I shouldn't say that. I know, if it hasn't been distributed to consumers, I would leave that with the attorneys to make that decision. But really, we focus on consumer level recalls where the product has gotten down to the consumer level or where it's had a chance to be distributed to consumers. And so that would be our main focus. I don't think there's any harm in a company saying just wanted to let you know we stopped at a hardware house. It didn't get to the consumer level, but we just want you to be aware that we're doing something. And not doing it is an official fast track report where you're asking for a recall, but just letting the commission know. I don't think there's any harm in that. But I mean, to me, our focus is really on product that gets down to the retailers to the consumers because if it gets to the retailers, consumers can have a chance of getting it. That's where we get into our focus for recalls. Yeah, I won't, this is not, I'm not speaking for the staff, obviously, I don't work here, but I think being in a warehouse, the staff would say that's still distributed in commerce. I don't think they would say the fact that it's not been sold through. That's relevant, certainly to your analysis, but it's not a, if the legal question is that in commerce, the answer is yes. Yeah, for me, it's hard because what kind of warehouse, like where are you at in your warehouse chain? I mean, if it's just your warehouse and it comes into the port and it's just been imported. I mean, to me, I would always err on the side of notifying the staff, but I would leave that to the attorneys to make that tough call in the back. Go ahead. What issue that comes up in the recall emergency situation where you can't directly verify it is usually you give a sample of the total consumer names and they can check and see if they got the rest of the screen. Yeah. I'll see if we want all the names and my suggestion is... Point taken. And really that is, I wanna say within the past two years, the direction has been to get the full entire list and sometimes it, careful what you ask for because you're getting this huge document. We've gotten some drives because the list was so large and sometimes it really is a battle to get that list but I will bump that up the chain to the powers it be. Go ahead. Tony, I was gonna... I'm sorry. I don't know, go ahead. Kind of... I think it's heightened in the context of fast track recall that it's a question of your question. If in the typical situation of a manufacturer conducting a recall, could you talk a little bit about relative responsibilities in rights of retailers, others in the supply chain? And very often, as I'm sure you know, you have differences in opinion between recall and entity. Let's call it, let's say, a manufacturer. Michael, you should work with your thoughts on this as well. And so about the nature of the defect, about the scope of the recall, ways to conduct the recall, how do you generally address those where you have bickering parties in the supply chain, particularly in, as I said, in the sort of condensed environment of the fast track? And then can you talk about literally what the rights are of, say, a retailer where they disagree with some of the parameters of a recall being conducted by a manufacturer? I feel like I need someone from General Counsel's office here. From a practical standpoint. Yeah, I would say that is one of the hardest things we have to do in the fast track program is when you're dealing with two different companies and a lot of times it's, we're doing the recall with the manufacturer, the importer, and the retailer has a difference of opinion. And it can make it a very complex thing. It can drag out a recall. And it's also come up recently with Twitter, with the tweets where the manufacturers are agreeing to the tweet and the retailer's going, I don't agree with this. There's no way. The license or the product's not agreeing with the tweet. And when you're down in that narrow window, we're holding up press releases over the tweet. But I think from a compliance standpoint, we try to stay out of anything that is a financial disagreement where who's going to pay for what or how that's going to be worked out. We kind of let you guys duke it out, as you will, with that aspect. But when it comes to the logistics of how it's going to be done, really it's the recalling firm. If it's the manufacturer and they're conducting the recall, it's their responsibility to see how they can get that plan to work with the retailers that are involved in that recall. And really we're relying upon them to find something that fits for the retailers. If a retailer is being unreasonable, we're more than happy to step in and try to facilitate that process. I do it on occasion where I'll call up a retailer and it's a completely different story I hear when I call them than what the manufacturer's telling me. But at least it resolves that issue and it gets it to the point where we can go out with that recall. Write some responsibilities. I'm going to leave that for an attorney because that's not my thing, but yeah. If a retailer really disagrees with the scope of a recall, the wording of a recall notice, should they contact you and if it comes down to manufacturer versus retailer, do you always side with the manufacturer or do you have a plan to sell it? Wow. I would say that yes, if a retailer is information that they feel is contradictory to what the manufacturer is saying, especially if they think the manufacturer is not being forthcoming, definitely report. But even if it's just a difference of opinion, I think it's good to provide that information so we can see the different perspective from the compliance staff, be able to say, okay, here's what the retailer is saying and this is the problem they're having carrying out this recall plan. Maybe we need to rethink this recall plan. Maybe it's not going to work for the other retailers as well. So I think it's important for retailers to let us know if there is something that's coming up that's a problem. If it comes down to the battle of the manufacturer and the retailer, we'll try to do our best to facilitate the retailer wherever we can, but the manufacturer will probably win out because we're trying to get that recall out, that notice out and so we'll try to make every effort we can to help out that retailer for whatever that issue is and I'm trying to anticipate from an issue standpoint. I mean, if it's something where I think the retailer is being unreasonable, I'll be more than happy to tell them you're being unreasonable about this and it's just not going to happen. So I might as well drop that now. And I can give you the number to our general counsel's office, you can give them a call. But if it's something where I really think they have a point, I will do my best to try to accommodate that and facilitate that to get it taken care of. But I have no problem as a compliance officer or my staff jumping in and trying to kind of mediate between the two to get these issues resolved. But I'll tell you very often it's small things like posters or getting products pulled from the shelves or where they're going to store them. A really big thing that's come up recently is retailers that want to destroy the product on site because they don't want to go through this return process back to manufacturers. And on that, I tell the manufacturer if you don't feel comfortable with them destroying it on site and they're not comfortable in their documentation of what they're going to provide you then say no, say that's not going to work, you can't destroy it on site. I don't know where it gets down to the rights and legalities of it. I leave that for my lawyer folks, but that's usually where I side on it when it comes into those kind of issues. I'll let you jump in with any thoughts you have. I thought that was great answer. As I fumbled through that one. I really need that law degree. Go ahead. I'm filed to close the file if need be. No, but usually there are several things that will trigger us to close it. One is a really good return rate. If a company has a very high return rate and hasn't asked for closure, I will most likely close that case file. If it's going on for an extensive period of time and we've tried to get notice out and the return rate's just not getting better or I hate to pick on candles, but say it's a candle, a disposable product you know it gets used up in a short period of time. You know, not the big candles, but you know, like a tea light or something. And we know that it's likely those tea lights have been used up and the recall monitoring has been going on for a year and a half, two years. We'll probably close that because the chances of getting, you know, this bumper, this spike in corrective and corrections is just not going to happen. And then one of the things I know that usually prevents us from closing a case file is when we see a lot of post recall incidents and they continue to come in. So it's, so I've had companies that have come back to me six months after the recall has been announced and said, okay, I want to close it, but they have 20 or 30 post recall incidents. And when I look at them, it's every month they're submitting, you know, five or six or seven post recall incidents. And I have to wonder what's going on. Why are you still getting all these incidents? So I think for us, there's definitely things that we see on our end that kind of flag us to say, ooh, why would we close this? Or, you know, definitely, you know, correction rates or length of time or just the type of product that it is would spawn us to close it. Any other questions? I hope we're not too early here. We still got time. If anybody wants to go ahead. Dave. Yeah, go ahead. When you do close a case because they haven't been able to send some of your equipment, do you ask the recall company to keep it in their website? Yes, yeah, we do. I mean, I know companies will routinely take it off their webpage or move it to another location, their webpage, but really our request is that they keep it on there. They should keep a record of their recalls. If for nothing else, other than as an information purpose is for consumers, I think having a place where you keep all that recall information, where people can go back and search through and find it is valuable. I mean, you did close a case, should you be allowing it in your house or should it have something to do with it? Yeah. But from a company's recall in this point of view, which then means the protection that I even say is real and special, but do you lose the protection of 6B because it's no longer a case that's being investigated? Yeah, that's a lawyer question, but I can't anticipate that you would lose 6B because it's closed. I think when you provide that information under 6B, I think that same information to be protected would still be protected even if it was closed, but I'm going to defer that to the lawyers just to be 100%, but that's my thoughts. Yeah, I mean, there are people who are, yeah, I'm not a 6B expert, but there's no provision in 6B that limits the commission to closed recalls. You know, that changes the requirements of the statute with respect to whether the corrective action is open or has been. The requirements as a matter is still investigation so being conducted and not. Yeah, you might be asking a FOIA question about whether or not there's been a remittable action settlement and so on, but. Any other questions? Go ahead. Good question. How many recalls are instigated by the CPSC as you see in Health Canada? Health Canada, we recently just saw or heard about compliance officers out in the field doing, investigated at the retail level. A lot of the recalls you see out of Health Canada are actually from their agents who pull products out of the retail, test it and it fails for either lead or small parts or fundability and then instigate a recall based on that. How many recalls are done that way through the CPSC? Let me make sure I get your question right. How many recalls do we do jointly with Canada over this or how many do we do it that way? Like you see in Health Canada, where CPSC supposedly has agents out in the field that are doing investigative work, looking at products to see if they meet regulatory requirements. How many recalls are done that way as they do in Health Canada? We're structured a little differently and so our compliance staff are all here at headquarters and we have our film investigators to go out to do those things for us at our direction and of course if they see things that they find might find that are issues they can alert us as well but our compliance staff would all be here at headquarters getting that information back from our field and compiling it and looking for patterns and trends. We do have two teams, Blake's team and Renee's team. Both of them have components within the team that solely are us generating our own casework where we've found an issue or problem and then on the regulated side because we break ourselves out versus regulated and unregulated products. So on the regulated side, they also have their components that are looking for those things whether it's at the port or domestically but a good percentage of our recalls are always fast track recalls and then of course we get a good percentage of reports that come in from companies that are not fast track where we may still do a recall but we also have a component, a smaller component of our self-generated cases that then lead to recall. I don't have numbers but I would say it's a good percentage but definitely not anywhere near half of the recalls we do. So the process is that if you do find something you notify the manufacturer, manufacturer then has a right to either refute it or look at the evidence and then it's up to the manufacturer then to initiate the recall. Not really. It depends on whether it's regulated or unregulated. If it's regulated, it's basically a non-compliance and I don't wanna speak for Mary Toro who's our regulatory enforcement person but it's a non-compliance and we seek some type of corrective action and that could be a recall, that could be a stop sale, that could be correcting future production. There's a whole host of remedies they have on their end to fix those non-compliances from a regulated standpoint, one of which is a recall. From a non-regulated standpoint, the first notification would be for us to notify the company that we had some type of information to suggest that there might be an issue and then we would request that full report information. We're asking the company, provide us what you have, provide us your incident data, provide us any testing documents, provide us whatever you have that relates to this product and this particular issue or issues and then we will get that information in. Our technical staff will review it, will review it, will look for information, will take other incidents that may have been reported into the commission that are similar and compare that together and kind of develop what we call a case and then determine whether there is a risk of injury, whether there is a defect that leads to a substantial pride hazard which is our term of art. And then at that point, if we thought that was the case, we would then notify the company that we had made a preliminary determination and asked them for a corrective action. They have the opportunity to refute that, dispute it, come in and meet with us, have a difference of opinion. We can revise that if need be. Usually we don't and then of course that would then lead to either a recall process or some other type of corrective action we'd be seeking. Did I get that okay Blake? Okay. Anything you wanna add since I'm in your territory now? So does that answer your, it's kind of, the process is similar but it's more of an information gathering up front than going to them and saying you have a problem or we more go to them and say, we found something, we need to know a lot more about it before we can make any decision. The announcement of the recall has always been from the manufacturer. On a volunteer, you've seen what this, what help Canada will put out a recall based on their findings that they pulled product out and failed planability, it failed lead, it failed small parts and notified the manufacturer, manufacturer agrees. So it's a joint recall between how Canada and the manufacturer. CPSC is joined, it's voluntarily working together but. They put out the, I guess the, the impetus of the recall has been because of Health Canada's action, as opposed to recalls that you normally see coming out. The manufacturer announces a recall because of X, Y and Z and there's not an underlying, did they, did it come from a consumer? Did it come from their own, you know, investigation? Did it come from the CPSC? Are you asking? I don't think there's a real difference here. Yeah. No, no, no, I don't know the sense of both, Canada and CPSC. I think it's a rooting difference. They announced the recalls. Yeah. It's both of them. Yeah. It's motivated by, as Tanya has described, either a voluntary action by manufacturer or a process of finding something and going and developing the fact. So I'll think there's a real difference between the two agencies and how they proceed. I don't think so. I think it's just that the main difference I see between the two is that they have basically what would be our compliance staff out in the field doing it. And we have ours here at headquarters where we use our field staff to get that information. The big thing is just the structure of how we're divided up because they're divided up by territories and broken down in that way. So I think it's just a structure and wording of our releases. I think our wording of our releases are a little different. But there would be a way to find out how many recalls are done because of what you have found in the field. We don't disclose that. Yeah. That's what I thought you were asking. The press releases, you can't tell whether it's a staff-initiated investigation or voluntary, I don't think, unless there's... Yeah, I mean, I always have people... Unless it's a unilateral press release. And there are a few of those that identify that the commission is making commentary. But the annual reports say how many of the recalls are initiated on a fast-track basis versus otherwise. And that gives you an idea of what's a fast-track and what's the traditional Section 15 report that leads to a recall. Yeah, but we never identify in the press release which one it might be. We just don't. I think the only exception to that is when we get information from a state attorney general, we'll usually bank the state in the bottom of the press release. So that's kind of a clue to you that the state had input. So it was probably something that was generated as part of an investigation. But other than that, I mean, there would be no clue from anybody on the outside to know the difference between them. Yeah. I mean, you'd just be able to get numbers. So it could be that if the state had a particular law that they were looking at that mirror the CPSC's regulatory, that they did an investigation on their own, they found that this company was in violation, may notify you? It could be that. But we've also had states that have just said to us, we found this issue and you should take a look at it. And then we just kind of jump in and take a look at it from, because if you're having this problem in Vermont, you might be having this problem in all the other states as well. So I think that's the only time I know where we've ever identified kind of a little bit into the source of where recall comes from. Go ahead. So is the rumor true that this patient had passed check program for two and a later OGC death investigation? No, it's not true at all. I wouldn't know. David. Do you have an idea of the sensitive to the result is the report, the report has a remit to tortures your young public job and just to be called and you're called? Yeah, I really, I always tell companies if you're not sure that a recall is necessary or you really kind of cold to the idea of a recall, you probably shouldn't be reporting under the fast track program in the first place. You should just make a regular Section 15 report and let Blake and Renee's team and their groups do their investigation into it. So for me, from the standpoint of a company not knowing whether it should be recalled or not or not really sure about it, if you're not sure, don't sign up for the fast track to get to the end of the finish line. If it's something where we get it in and we think the company really did do it under abundance of caution and there's really no risk of injury or the risk of injury is extremely low and we need sun, moon and stars to line up before anything could happen. We do have a process. We don't use it very often where we do kind of screen out that report. We thank the company for reporting to us, tell them that here's all the things you said you were gonna do. Go ahead and do those, just do it without us because the hazard doesn't rise to a level where we need to be involved in it. Most people will never see that letter. I probably write four or five of them a year. So it's very rare that we use it because to me, when I'm looking at it, if I think the hazard could happen, I'm probably not gonna screen it. It was really reserved for those things where I think there's just no way anybody can get injured with this. You'd really have to work at it. Anything else? Okay, well thank you everyone. I appreciate all the questions. Thank you. Thanks, Laura.