If you are an officer of an organisation you must exercise due diligence to ensure that the organisation complies with their duties under the work health and safety legislation. Failure of the organisation to fulfil their duty along with failure to demonstrate due diligence can result in fines of up to $600,000 or five years’ imprisonment.
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Director and Officer Due Diligence
Due diligence includes taking reasonable steps:
- to acquire and keep up-to-date knowledge of work health and safety matters, and
- to gain an understanding of the nature of the operations of the business or undertaking of the person conducting the business or undertaking and generally of the hazards and risks associated with those operations, and
- to ensure that the person conducting the business or undertaking has available for use, and uses, appropriate resources and processes to eliminate or minimise risks to health and safety from work carried out as part of the conduct of the business or undertaking, and
- to ensure that the person conducting the business or undertaking has appropriate processes for receiving and considering information regarding incidents, hazards and risks and responding in a timely way to that information, and
- to ensure that the person conducting the business or undertaking has, and implements, processes for complying with any duty or obligation of the person conducting the business or undertaking under this Act, and
- to verify the provision and use of the resources and processes referred to in paragraphs (c)–(e).
For the purposes of paragraph (e), the duties or obligations under this Act of a person conducting a business or undertaking may include:
• reporting notifiable incidents,
• consulting with workers,
• ensuring compliance with notices issued under this Act,
• ensuring the provision of training and instruction to workers about work health and safety,
• ensuring that health and safety representatives receive their entitlements to training.
We work with directors and officers to characterise in practical terms what this means for their context and design a program of activity that aims to ensure they are able to demonstrate due diligence.
The outcome is being able to demonstrate due diligence.
We Can
- Provide briefing sessions for officers to keep their knowledge up to date
- Complete a risk review of the PCBU’s operations to characterise the risk profile
- Conduct audits and inspections to gather due diligence information
- Assess the PCBU’s management systems and processes
- Formulate, distribute and analyse survey data to characterise the levels of implementation
- Benchmark activities and performance against other organisations
- Assess the resources allocated to health and safety
We work with:
- Boards
- Directors and officers
- Administrators
- Merger and Acquisition Teams
- In house legal teams
- Law firms
- Audit and risk committees
- Management and leadership teams
- Risk and Compliance Managers
- Health, Safety and Environment Professionals
- Operational personnel