Arlington, Va., April 1, 2004– Joan Z. (Jodie) Bernstein, former director of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission, has been elected to the Board of Directors of the Council of Better Business Bureaus. Currently Of Counsel at Bryan Cave in Washington, DC, Ms. Bernstein will serve a three-year term as a public member of the Council’s Board.
CBBB President and CEO Ken Hunter said, “Ms. Bernstein’s experience as a highly regarded regulator, her credibility with consumer organizations and her familiarity with effective industry self-regulation will be invaluable in lending a public perspective to our Board. Her counsel will greatly assist us in formalizing and implementing strategic objectives for the Council to serve our domestic and global marketplace in the years to come.”
During Ms. Bernstein’s six-year tenure as head of consumer protection at the FTC, the agency targeted fraudulent operators of commercial Web sites; initiated a leading coordinating program in government efforts to attack identity theft; and reported to Congress on issues of Internet privacy and self-regulation in the alcohol industry.
“Under Jodie Bernstein’s extraordinary leadership, the implementation of a careful strategic and operational planning process (the agency’s first) resulted in hundreds of sound cases, the flowering of consumer and business education, the creation of an Internet and phone-based system for consumer complaints, dozens of workshops on the myriad issues of the consumer protection world and unprecedented cooperation with other federal, state, and international agencies,” FTC Chairman Timothy J. Muris said when honoring Ms. Bernstein with the 2003 Miles W. Kirkpatrick Lifetime FTC Achievement Award.
Jodie Bernstein has also received the Good Housekeeping Award, the National Consumer League Trumpeter Award and an Excellence in Government Service Award from the National Association of Women Executives in State Government.
Her government experience included working for several years in the Environmental Protection Agency and at the Department of Health and Human Services. During her years in the private sector, she represented major companies in environmental matters.
Jodie Bernstein was awarded an L.L.D. from Yale University and a B.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin.
The Council of Better Business Bureaus (CBBB) has more than 270 leading-edge national corporate members and serves as the umbrella organization (www.bbb.org) for the Better Business Bureaus in the U.S. and Canada, which are supported by 300,000 business members throughout North America. The BBB system is dedicated to fostering fair and honest relationships between businesses and consumers, instilling consumer confidence and contributing to an ethical business environment, in both the traditional and online marketplaces.
The first BBB was founded in 1912, and the network of BBBs and the Council have grown to become the most recognized advocate for promoting ethical business and advertising practices, providing more than 41.5 million instances of service to consumers and businesses in 2002. The Council’s National Advertising Division and Children’s Advertising Review Unit administer the advertising industry's national self-regulation program; its Internet self-regulation program, BBBOnLine (www.bbbonline.org), helps consumers identify online merchants that meet BBB standards through its Reliability and Privacy "trustmark" programs, and the BBB Code of Online Business Practices.