Despite numerous awareness campaigns carried out on the roles and functions of the Independent Consumer and Competitions Commission (ICCC), there is still confusion about its functions, especially with matters of price control in light of increases in prices of goods and services in the country. It is for this reason that the ICCC Commissioner and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Mr. Paulus Ain is once again urging the public to understand that the ICCC does not control the prices of all goods and services. “Many people think that ICCC controls prices of all food items and services including shoes, clothes, and others. This kind of perception needs to be corrected,” Mr. Ain said. The ICCC only regulates prices of certain declared goods and services only. He went on to explain that under the ICCC Act 2002, the Commission is basically powerless to control prices of all goods and services, instead under the Act the main function of the ICCC is to promote competition and do price monitoring. “The price control function (of the ICCC) was done away 20 years ago, and ICCC was given the price monitoring powers to monitor shelf prices and check factors affecting price increase.” However, with the current price surveillance exercise the ICCC is conducting, Mr. Ain explained that the ICCC had to sought government intervention to get extra powers to at least control prices of basic food items like rice, flour, and sugar. This enabled the ICCC to monitor shelf prices of the basic items to be set within a 10 percent range and not above that. "In the event where the shop owner wants to increase their prices, they have to seek prior approval from ICCC and only upon assessment of their genuinity then we allow them to increase their prices," Mr. Ain said. This exercise now is to check the current shelf price against the base price from last year to ensure prices are within the 10% range. The basic food items ICCC is monitoring its shelf prices for are rice, tinned fish, tinned meat, and flour, sugar, cooking oil, frozen chicken products, frozen meat products, soap (bar and liquid) and baby formula.