가맹·대리점법의 효과적 집행을 위한 공정위-지자체 협력 방안 연구

The franchise business and agency field are distribution sectors where unfair trade practices occur frequently, as one party in the transaction takes a superior position over the other due to information asymmetry and economic disparities. Originally, franchise or agency businesses also have cooperation and coexistence through division of labor as their essence. In this sense, supply chain stability through organic cooperation between the franchisor and franchisee, and between suppliers and agents, is a key factor that maintains franchise and agency contracts and determines the success of the distribution business. Therefore, in order for franchise and agency businesses to continue to prosper together, it is very important to have a way to resolve disputes between the parties in advance before the conflict situation leads to the ultimate breakdown of the contractual relationship. Under the policy of spreading fair order in the distribution sector, cooperation between the Fair Trade Commission and local governments has steadily increased in terms of policy and institutional aspects. Starting with the three metropolitan governments of Seoul, Gyeonggi Province, and Incheon in 2019, the franchise information disclosure registration business, as well as the franchise and agency dispute resolution business that was previously the work of the Korea Fair Trade Mediation Agency, was transferred to Busan in 2020. Afterward, five additional tasks related to fact-finding, such as the obligation to provide a written notice of estimated sales in franchise business, the obligation to keep and open the basis for calculating estimated sales, the obligation to provide and keep the estimated sales calculation statement, and the obligation to keep the franchise contract, were also transferred in sequence. In order to maintain the consistency of the results of the dispute resolution committees of the two systems, the Fair Trade Commission also enacted the basis for the operation guidelines for dispute resolution in the franchise and agency fields through legislation, and established the “Operation Guidelines for Dispute Resolution in the Franchise and Agency Fields” that includes the details of the notification of cases, handling of duplicate applications, preparation of complementary procedures, and specification of the powers of the representative and the investigation methods of the committee. In order for the domestic franchise and agency business to move beyond the maturity stage and focus on qualitative growth rather than quantitative growth, it is necessary to establish a negotiation procedure that can prevent disputes in advance through cooperation and collaboration between businesses, and even if disputes occur, it is inevitable that the number of dispute resolution procedures, which are pre-dispute resolution procedures, will increase rather than leading to the ultimate termination of the contractual relationship. In order to carry out the task of expanding and strengthening the work of dispute resolution, it is necessary to have consistent work processing through close cooperation between the committees through the transfer of the Fair Trade Commission's franchise and agency business authority to local governments.