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Art. 4

2. Duties

The Central Office is responsible for all business matters involved in supervising the trade in precious metals and precious metal articles. Specifically, its duties are to:¹

a.

submit motions and report to the Federal Department of Finance and execute the instructions of the Department;

^b.

²supervise the management of the Assay Offices and of sworn trade assayers (Art. 18, 19, 33 and 34); approve the budgets and annual accounts of the Assay Offices (Art. 19 para. 3);

c.³

register the responsibility marks (Art. 69-75);

d.⁴

supervise the official controlling and hallmarking of precious metal articles and multi-metal articles (Art. 81-123);

e.⁵

arrange and supervise the diploma examination for sworn assayers and also issue and withdraw diplomas (Art. 22 and 25);

f.

issue and withdraw assayer licences as trade assayers (Art. 29 and 34);

g.⁶

issue and withdraw melter’s licences (Art. 165, 166a and 166);

h.

supervise the determinations of the fineness of melt products (Art. 173-178);

i.⁷

register and store documents sent by the Assay Offices, by sworn trade assayers and by holders of melter’s licences as well as other correspondence;

k.⁸

procure new official stamps/hallmarks and destroy those which have become unusable⁹ (Art. 113 and 114);

l.¹⁰

supervise the domestic market (Art. 15 para. 2);

m.¹¹

rule on appeals against orders of Assay Offices and trade assayers;

n.¹²

keep accounts for the fees flowing into the federal coffers.

English is not an official language of the Swiss Confederation. This translation is provided for information purposes only and has no legal force.