CaseTrust has been pushing businesses towards excellence by means of raising service quality and promoting ethical business practices ("More inspections needed under the hood at car dealers" by Mr Lawrence Loh Kiah Muan; Forum Online, Jan 5).

To this end, all businesses that qualify for the CaseTrust accreditation scheme are subjected to a rigorous audit process that requires businesses to establish transparent and consumer-friendly policies, ethical advertising and proper dispute resolution procedures.

The criteria stipulated in the CaseTrust-SVTA accreditation for motoring businesses require businesses to provide accurate and adequate information on prices and quality of terms of sales. This includes presenting varying sets of prices on the financing or insurance arranged by dealers.

Businesses are also obligated to ensure that critical information is not left blank when the consumer signs on the application form for hire purchases.

As a result of the accreditation, we have, in fact, seen an improvement in standards, as witnessed by the decline in the number of complaints over unsatisfactory services across the motoring industry.

In particular, CaseTrust-accredited companies have far fewer complaints and those that do surface are often resolved quickly.

For this reason, we strongly encourage consumers to patronise our CaseTrust-accredited companies.

CaseTrust also educates businesses about the fair trading legislation, to ensure customer support and service staff of CaseTrust-accredited businesses do not practise any unethical sales tactics.

We encourage Mr Loh to give feedback to the Consumers Association of Singapore (Case) about specific car dealers that employ unfair practices towards consumers. We will certainly take action against them.

Lim Biow Chuan

President

Consumers Association of Singapore