Compliance Management System Australia

A compliance management system in Australia is the software and process an organisation uses to meet obligations set by several regulators at once, across federal, state and territory law. What makes the Australian version distinct is not the software. It is that the underlying rules are not uniform, so the system has to carry more than one version of the truth.

Work health and safety is the clearest example. Every jurisdiction except Victoria has adopted the model WHS laws. Victoria runs its own Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004, with similar duties but different drafting and different regulations behind it. An employer with people in Melbourne and Brisbane is working to two sets of requirements at the same time, and a system built on the assumption of one national rulebook will quietly report against the wrong one.

Other obligations run the opposite way and apply federally wherever staff sit. Public companies, large proprietary companies and proprietary companies acting as trustees of registrable superannuation entities must have a whistleblower policy under section 1317AI of the Corporations Act, and subsection 5 prescribes what that policy has to contain. ASIC’s stated view is that responsibility for the policy and how it is implemented rests with the board, not with the compliance team alone.

An Australian compliance management system therefore tends to need to:

• apply obligations by location and role, rather than pushing one national rule set to everyone
• hold policies and acknowledgements in a form that can be produced on request
• join compliance to risk and incident reporting through a governance, risk and compliance framework
• keep records and support onshore, which Australian boards regularly ask about during procurement and is one reason Sentrient is Australian owned and operated

Posts tagged here look at how Australian organisations design and run these systems, and the case studies show how comparable organisations have approached it. ASIC’s Regulatory Guide 270 on whistleblower policies is a useful illustration of how prescriptive a single Australian obligation can become. Requirements differ across states and territories and change over time, so treat this as general information rather than legal advice. To see the parts in one place, browse the Sentrient compliance management system.