Mark DavisEconomics15 October 2011

Federal Trade CommissionThe Federal Trade Commission, commonly known as the FTC, is a government

regulation agency of the USA primarily for the promotion of consumer protection and the removal of anti-competitive business practices, namely monopolistic mergers. The FTC was founded for the purpose of trust-busting under the Wilson administration. It has since grown to create and enforce numerous other regulations and now has multiple bureaus – the Bureau of Consumer Protection fights against unfair or deceptive business practice, the Bureau of Competition enforces anti-trust laws, and the Bureau of Economics supports both other bureaus with expert advice.

The FTC hires a wide range of employees, and has approximately 1000 employees in permanent staff, 500 of which are attorneys. A newly hired attorney is paid a GS-11 or GS-12 salary, which equates to about 50 to 60 thousand dollars per year in salary. The FTC’s paralegals make GS-5 to GS-7 at the start, with a GS-5 making 27,500$ per year and a GS-7 making 33,900$ per year, but if a paralegal applies and is accepted in the FTC’s Honors Paralegal Program, they are guaranteed a GS-7 salary from the beginning. The Honors Paralegal Program is very competitive, but obviously worth the competition if a paralegal gets in. The FTC also hires economists at a GS pay scale of 12 to 15 (60000 to 99600 $ per year) initial salary, but only hires economists with PhD’s or equivalent degrees and currently only has 70 permanent economists on payroll. Note that listed salaries are base pay, and all GS salaries actually consist of a base pay and a local adjustment ranging from, usually, 14 to 35 percent – that is to say, the location a GS worker works in the US adds a certain amount to their salary depending upon their salary to account for the cost of living in their location. So all of the above salaries are only the base salary, which means that all of these jobs pay the aforementioned salary plus another 14 to 35 percent of what is listed above, to help with living expenses of the local area.

An interesting event involving the Federal Trade Commission is the matter of the Sears Holding Corporation’s “My SHC Community” program. In 2009, the FTC filed a complaint against the Sears Holding Management Corporation for deceptive business practices in their spread of software that ran in the background on users’ computers and logged nearly all internet activity while it ran. About 15% of visitors to sears.com and kmart.com were offered an invitation to “My SHC Community,” a group that they were told was an interactive online community to have their voice heard within the Sears company. The users who signed up were offered ten dollars if they kept the application running for at least one month. Deep within the End User License Agreement of said “research software,” the small print stated that the program would record all internet activity of the user, but that “if” anything like user IDs, passwords, and credit card numbers were “accidentally” recorded, Sears would “make commercially viable efforts to purge [their] database of such information.” The FTC called Sears out on this one, stating that Sears must make a clear statement of what information is being recorded by the software, how it will be used, and if it will be given to any third parties. SHMC was also told to destroy their current database – which contained all information they had already collected – and notify the customers who had already downloaded the software of what it actually does. The FTC offered assistance to customers on how to uninstall said software.