Fun fact. Well, not fun, but appears to be a fact nonetheless (don’t bother reading the rest of this post expecting to find something interesting – you’ve been warned).
The FSC publishes a list of the outcomes of administrative appeals on its website. There are 168 records on the English site at the moment. I skimmed through all 168, and as far as I can tell, almost every single one ends with:
The FSC Administrative Appeal Review Committee decided as follows: The administrative appeal will not be entertained.
The exception was a few of the earlier ones toward the end, which instead ended with:
The Administrative Appeal Review Committee dismiss the administrative appeal decision.
Which I suspect may just be a change in language. I couldn’t find a single one where the administrative appeal was accepted.
The Chinese site has 209 records, which are far more detailed than the brief English summaries. I didn’t go through all of those, because I’m not completely mental, but I looked at a few and they appear to follow a similar pattern (machine translated):
According to Article 1, Paragraph 1 of the Petition Law, this article stipulates: “If the people believe that the administrative sanctions imposed by the central or local authorities are illegal or inappropriate and have harmed their rights or interests, they may file a petition in accordance with this law.” Paragraph 1 of Article 3 stipulates: “Administrative sanctions as mentioned in this Law refer to unilateral administrative actions that have direct legal effects on the outside world, such as decisions made by central or local authorities on specific matters under public law or other public power measures.” If a petition is filed for non-administrative sanctions or other matters that are not within the scope of petition relief according to law, the decision shall be made as not to be accepted in accordance with Article 77, Paragraph 8 of the Petition Act.
The common theme seems to be:
- Using Articles 1 and 3 of the Administrative Appeal Act to claim that the act only refers to administrative actions that have direct legal effects on the outside world, and so non-administrative actions and other stuff aren’t covered (this seems to ignore Article 2 of the same act, which specifically stipulates inaction as also being appealable, and a few of the records specifically mentioned the appellant being dissatisfied with the inaction of bureaus of the FSC).
- Using Article 77 Paragraph 8 of the same act (“An administrative appeal is filed against non-administrative action or other cases which are beyond the scope of administrative appeal remediless according to other Acts,” in a list of situations where appeals won’t be entertained) for the same reason.
- Claiming under Articles 5, 13, and 14 of the Financial Consumer Protection Act that the FSC isn’t an administrative agency but a legal entity that isn’t entrusted to exercise public power (I don’t see where these articles say that), so the Administrative Appeal Act doesn’t apply at all.
- Some more stuff about, like, it’s just our opinion man. What we wrote is just a simple factual statement and explanation of reasons, and it doesn’t affect your rights or the outside world. We’re not an administrative agency!
What a load of BS. Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us, @Mataiou! We might need to appeal to the Executive Yuan to make the FSC do their job of making the Banking Bureau do their job.
When I called and wrote to the FSC earlier in the week, they didn’t seem to want to tell me about the appeal process and suggested several times I just submit another complaint through their website.