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MangoCats@feddit.it 2 days agoCurious: how often in your field are people harassed out of work by politically motivated complaints?
Around here, restaurant owners are very vulnerable to that kind of harassment - they can literally be put out of business just by people complaining to the health department, with no real basis to the complaints. Its one thing that keeps restaurant owners out of politics.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 2 days ago
Not that often, since it is a very formal matter to sue a registered accountant over here. It costs like 50 euro to complain or something and the accountant can lose his title from it.
nba.nl/…/jaaroverzicht-klachtencommissie-nba-2024…
MangoCats@feddit.it 2 days ago
Yeah, 50€ will stop the drunk at the pub from filing a complaint on his mobile for a lark, but in the greater scheme it’s no barrier at all for people intent on serious harassment.
That’s almost always on the table with complaint investigations against licensed professionals of all kinds.
The bigger trick is: who are the regulators that execute the decision making process, how onerous is it to fight it, etc. A lot of what goes down around here on the “bad side” of all that is that certain actors familiar with the system will develop relationships with the regulatory body and launch complaints sufficient to significantly harass license holders (or any regulated person) just enough to really bother them, but not quite enough to trigger a fight with lawyers in the courts and appeals processes. In a competitive arena like running a restaurant, the harassment can be expensive and time consuming enough to tip the balance between profitable, and shutting down.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 1 day ago
If you file a complaint with an instance like the NBA in this instance it will not go directly to the person who you complained about. They should stop the harassment.
In the case of accountants, the rules and regulations already make us write down a lot of our work and why we made certain decisions. If something is not written down, it is going to be hard to defend.
Yes in a restaurant it is different, but generally harassment is pretty rare, at least with the restaurants I have or had as clients. None really saw it as an issue. You just ban them, kick them out, call the cops if it really becomes bad or just deal with the couple bad reviews.
MangoCats@feddit.it 1 day ago
Yeah, that’s how it should work. We have personal experience of a bogus complaint being filed by a big player with a regulatory agency, the agency coming around and interviewing / intimidating us, and subsequently sending us paperwork finding that the complaint was “substantiated” - something we consulted with a couple of lawyers about and they said “this would never, ever stand up in any kind of hearing or trial or other official process, but… to get it reversed will effectively cost you a couple of thousand dollars out of pocket and a lot of time and hassle - better to ignore it.” Of course the real issue is that the big player was guilty of everything in the complaint and more, this is just them “getting in front of the problem” before we complained about them - which we actually had no intention of doing…
The restaurant example comes from a friend who was running a restaurant when he decided to run for political office. His incumbent opponent was directing health inspections of his restaurant at about 10x the normal frequency of inspections… Again, you can fight it, but even if you have the resources to win, what do you get for your troubles?
Meanwhile, the bad actors in the above scenarios repeat their bad actions over and over for marginal advantages. Maybe someday they’ll be taken down for it, but usually not.