Inspections to increase focus on highest risk

NOPSEMA is changing how it programs its inspections, spending less time inspecting activities where the duty holder has demonstrated compliance and more time inspecting higher risk activities.

While NOPSEMA’s regulatory processes have long been regarded as world-class, recent events including the COVID-19 pandemic, the decommissioning of the Northern Endeavour, and the Australian Government’s deregulation agenda has prompted the regulator to change its approach to ensure we remain effective.

A more flexible and dynamic approach to inspections will improve NOPSEMA’s efficiency by redirecting resources to monitor the higher risk activities and reduce regulatory burden on duty holders that have already demonstrated compliance.

NOPSEMA will maintain a ‘baseline’ frequency of risk-based inspections, for example, we will continue to inspect activities where the duty holder has demonstrated compliance, but the activity and oil type pose a higher risk.

NOPSEMA will also now include formal conclusions in its inspection reports to ensure our findings and observations are communicated clearly. Duty holders will continue to own the risks and must address issues and non-compliance identified by NOPSEMA in a timely manner.

NOPSEMA will continue to issue recommendations to set out the actions it expects duty holders to take to address issues and non-compliance. Recommendations are issued where the issue or non-compliance is of a nature that can be managed by the duty holder, does not pose an immediate or significant threat, and is not a serious or blatant contravention of the law. NOPSEMA will follow-up all recommendations and take enforcement action where warranted.

Further changes are being considering including greater flexibility for duty holders to manage risks and increased accountability to address the cause(s) of non-compliance identified by NOPSEMA. In the coming months, NOPSEMA will publish a revised Inspection policy for comment detailing the forthcoming changes.