International Law

Equine Influenza Inquiry and AQIS Compliance system

The Equine Influenza Inquiry Report is a useful case study of the breakdown of an organisation's compliance and risk management framework.

Page xxii describes AQIS as an "an organisation that lacked clear lines of communication between those responsible for formulating procedures and work instructions and those responsible for implementing them; one in which there was insufficient training and education in relation to the procedures and instructions to be followed; one in which there was no checking to ensure that those procedures and instructions were being implemented; and one in which any business plan or other reporting system did not alert senior management to these failures."

Section 10 analyses AQIS non-compliance in detail.

In Section 5.11 the Report describes Biosecurity Australia's lack of a formal risk analysis:
"The quarantine policies... emerged over time, and the conditions or requirements had been varied to take account of outbreaks of particular diseases or revised assessments of risks attaching to those diseases. Most importantly, no formal risk analysis was carried out by Biosecurity Australia, or any of its predecessors, in relation to the importation of horses, and there was no single document identifying the diseases and risks associated with such importation and describing how they are to be dealt with by the imposition of import conditions with a view to achieving the outcome that the ?level of quarantine risk? is sufficiently low to enable the importation to proceed consistently with Australia?s conservative but not zero-risk approach to animal and plant biosecurity risks."

Full post as published by Australian Regulatory Compliance Review on June 15, 2008 (boomark / email).