Legal Compliance Updates and Checks

Most organisations comply with the law. Far fewer can prove it on the day an auditor asks, which is why compliance obligations are one of the most common sources of audit findings. Four things tend to go wrong, usually more than one at a time.

• The register was built for certification and never touched again. It was accurate the day it was written. Two years later nobody is certain it still reflects the law, and nobody owns the question.
• Nobody has established what applies. For a single site doing one thing, the list is short. For a business with several sites, hired plant, waste streams, subcontractors and a few hazardous substances, it is not obvious at all, and an incomplete register tends to stay undiscovered until the thing it missed goes wrong.
• There is no evidence that anyone has checked. The organisation complies, but the standard asks for a periodic evaluation of compliance and a record of it. "We would know if we did not" is not a record.
• It lands on one person. Keeping up with legislation is a specialist job, usually given to someone who already has a full-time one. It is the first thing to slip in a busy month.

What we do about it

We scope your register properly first: which legislation applies to your sites, your activities and the standards you hold, established with legal input rather than assembled from a template. We then hold and maintain it, categorised so entries can be filtered by site, activity or standard rather than sitting as one long list nobody opens.

Changes are monitored continuously by legal specialists. The harder part, and where most legal update services stop, is working out what a change actually obliges you to do. We have a legal team behind this service to establish the duty rather than the headline, and we map it against your operation: which sites, activities, processes or materials it touches, and whether it changes anything for you at all.

So what reaches you is not a link to a statutory instrument. It is: this has changed, this is what it now requires, it affects this activity at these sites, and this is what you need to do. Or, just as often, nothing changes for you, and here is why. Both answers are recorded, because "we considered it and it did not apply to us" is evidence in its own right. It also means legislative change stops arriving as a surprise.

We carry out the periodic evaluation of compliance requirement by requirement, with evidence attached and dated. And we come to site. A desk review tells you the paperwork exists. A site check tells you whether the statutory inspection happened, the permit conditions are being met and the training is current. The largest category we find is usually "compliant, but unable to prove it", and that is the one that fails an audit.

For organisations holding several standards, one register serves all of them. Environmental, health and safety, information security and energy obligations overlap more than they differ. The service is available on an ongoing basis or as a one-off legal compliance audit, and it is included as standard in our outsourced system maintenance.

Equas is not a law firm and this service is not legal advice. Where an obligation is genuinely uncertain or the exposure is significant, we will say so and recommend that you take professional legal advice.