How quickly must I respond if the market surveillance authority contacts me?

Response deadline is not set, but responding quickly is still wise

There is no fixed, legally prescribed deadline that can be cited for responding to a request from a market surveillance authority — that detail does not appear in ACM's published information on accessibility oversight. What can be said is this: ACM calls on companies to prepare themselves and actively engage with the rules, which indicates that an active approach is expected as soon as contact is made, rather than a passive one.

In practice, a letter or question from a market surveillance authority signals that it is time to respond, document, and show what steps have already been taken or are planned. For those who face this situation, there is a separate explanation about what to do after an ACM letter about accessibility. Also relevant is that an investigation does not arise only from a complaint: the market surveillance authority can also check a website without prompting from a complainant, as described in the explanation about investigation following an anonymous tip.

What the source does and does not establish

The ACM publication on oversight of website and app accessibility contains the announcement that ACM will act as a market surveillance authority and that companies must prepare themselves, but it contains no concrete response deadline for individual requests or correspondence. As soon as ACM itself provides clarity on this, for example in the form of a standard deadline in a letter or an enforcement framework, that is the source to follow — until then, a deadline cannot be stated with certainty here. For those who want to know which authority in the Netherlands has responsibility for oversight and how that role is structured, that information can be found in the explanation about which market surveillance authority checks the accessibility of webshops.