The Regulator Has Already Told You... What an Overdue Improvement Notice Says About Leadership

On 18 Aug 26, WorkSafe Victoria reported that Chemical Solutions (VIC) Pty Ltd had been fined $40,000 after pleading guilty to two dangerous-goods charges at the Broadmeadows Magistrates' Court.

Failing to comply with an improvement notice by the due date, and remaining silent, attracts greater scrunity and can attract prosecution and a financial penalty.

The company was sentenced without conviction on 06 Aug 26. It was fined $25,000 for failing to comply with an improvement notice and another $15,000 for failing to eliminate or reduce the risk of chemical and physical reactions between incompatible dangerous goods. The court also ordered $5,207 in costs.

The $40,000 makes an easy headline.

The more useful leadership question is what happened after an inspector had already identified a problem, issued a statutory notice and put a compliance date against it.

The regulator had already defined the problem

WorkSafe inspectors attended the company's Coolaroo facility in Aug 24 and found dangerous goods stored unsecured on pallet racking.

The resulting improvement notice required Chemical Solutions to secure dangerous goods stored on pallets, conduct a risk assessment for the use of the racking, develop a safe work procedure covering the storage arrangements, and establish informal and formal racking inspections together with defect reporting and plant tag-out processes.

Those are not vague aspirations.

By the time the notice existed, the organisation was no longer trying to decide whether there might be a problem. An inspector had identified a contravention, documented it and established what needed to be remedied.

WorkSafe returned two weeks later. According to its prosecution release, only some of the issues had been addressed by the compliance date. Full compliance with the improvement notice was not achieved until Feb 25.

That changes the nature of the management problem...

Before the notice, an organisation might argue about whether its internal inspections, audits or risk assessments should have detected the issue.

After the notice, that argument becomes much less interesting.

There is now a regulatory action with a deadline.

Who owns it?

A notice should not disappear into the safety department

An improvement notice is sometimes treated like an unusually important corrective action.

It is more than that.

Under the current Dangerous Goods Act 1985 in Victoria, an inspector may issue an improvement notice where the inspector reasonably believes there is a contravention, or one that is likely to continue or recur. The notice must specify a date by which the problem is to be remedied, having regard to the severity of the relevant risks and the nature of the contravention. A person issued with the notice must comply with it.

That should have organisational consequences.

The person coordinating safety may administer the notice. They might liaise with the inspector, arrange contractors, prepare risk assessments and assemble close-out evidence.

That does not mean the safety function should quietly own the regulatory risk.

Someone with operational authority needs to own the required change. Someone with sufficient management authority needs visibility of progress. Where work, expenditure, engineering input, procurement or production changes are required, the people capable of authorising those things need to know before the compliance date becomes a crisis.

Senior management should not discover that an improvement notice exists because the regulator has come back and found that it has not been complied with.

I have walked back in after the due date

This part is from my own experience as an inspector. It is not a description of WorkSafe Victoria's handling of the Chemical Solutions matter, and, although I am experienced in dangerous goods as a safety professional, for transparency, I was never appointed an Inspector under the Dangerous Goods Act (I was dually appointed under the Victorian OHS Act and Equipment (Public Safety) Act).

There were occasions when I would return the day after an improvement notice was due, or as close to the compliance date as I could reasonably manage, and find that almost nothing had been done.

Not "we are nearly there".

Not a contractor booked, materials ordered and interim controls operating while the final work was completed.

Stuff all.

Sometimes there had not even been an attempt to contact the regulator before the due date to explain that compliance could not be achieved in time.

My next step was to document the failure to comply and ring my Group Leader.

Depending on the circumstances, a short further enforcement timeframe might then be recorded, together with a clear verbal undertaking from a named duty-holder representative that they understood what was required and intended to achieve compliance by that further date.

Then I would go back.

Finding the same non-compliance again changed the conversation considerably.

There would be another call to the Group Leader, followed in some cases by a much firmer discussion with the employer representative about where continued failure could lead, including referral for investigation and possible prosecution.

The original due date had still been missed. Another fortnight did not make that disappear.

When the notice finally reaches senior management

One case has stayed with me.

The person dealing with the safety issue (a safety advisor employed by the organisation) had effectively done nothing meaningful with the notice. The underlying serious risk remained in the operational area while the regulatory action sat elsewhere in the organisation.

After repeated non-compliance and the final escalation, senior management became aware of the notice and the history around it.

The safety advisor subsequently lost their job. It is not particularly common to see a safety practitioner dismissed over the handling of a safety matter, which is probably one reason the case stuck in my memory.

Management then sought more time.

It was not granted.

The explanation that senior people had not previously known about the notice did not make the outstanding risk disappear, and it did not alter the fact that the duty holder had already been given time to comply.

That is the governance point I take from the experience.

If senior management genuinely does not know that a statutory improvement notice is approaching or has passed its compliance date, that absence of knowledge is not evidence that the system worked. It is evidence worth examining.

If you cannot meet the date, silence is a poor control

This does not mean every compliance delay is evidence of indifference.

Some notices require engineering work. Specialist contractors may be needed. Equipment may have long procurement times. An organisation may discover, after beginning the work, that the original solution will not achieve what was expected.

Those situations need management rather than wishful thinking.

WorkSafe Victoria publishes specific guidance for applications seeking an extension of an improvement-notice compliance date. Relevant considerations include why the original date cannot be met, whether the applicant has taken appropriate steps towards compliance, whether suitable interim controls will operate, whether the request was made promptly and whether it was made before the compliance date.

The guidance is particularly useful on one point: waiting until the date has already passed is materially different from identifying the problem early and formally dealing with it. Inspectors are then contacted for their view on the requested extension and whether they support the extension or not, and the reason for the decision.

WorkSafe says an application made after the compliance date may mean the person has contravened the relevant legislation again by failing to achieve compliance on time, potentially leading to investigation or prosecution.

For management, the practical rule should be simple.

"No news" cannot be an acceptable status for an open statutory notice.

The second dangerous-goods issue

The prosecution also concerned a separate Sep 24 inspection.

WorkSafe inspectors found four 205-litre drums of Class 3 flammable liquid stored beside intermediate bulk containers containing a Class 8 corrosive. WorkSafe's investigation found that practicable options existed to separate the goods, including storage in separate physical locations or compounds, separation by at least three metres, or an appropriate segregation arrangement.

Regulation 34 of the Dangerous Goods (Storage and Handling) Regulations 2022 requires an occupier to eliminate the risk associated with chemical and physical reactions between dangerous goods and other substances or articles, or, where elimination is not reasonably practicable, reduce that risk so far as is reasonably practicable.

The prosecution release does not establish that the racking notice and the incompatible-goods storage arose from the same organisational cause.

It would be speculation to say that they did.

Their proximity does, however, give other organisations a useful reason to ask a broader question. When a regulator identifies one dangerous-goods failure, is the response limited to fixing exactly what is written on the notice, or does somebody examine whether the same weakness exists elsewhere in the storage and handling system?

Compliance with the notice is mandatory.

Learning from why the notice became necessary is a separate management task.

Close-out needs evidence

Another weakness appears when an organisation treats the word "completed" as sufficient evidence.

Look at what this particular notice reportedly required.

Securing dangerous goods on pallets is capable of being physically verified. A risk assessment can be reviewed for its scope, hazards and controls. A safe work procedure can be checked against the actual storage process. A racking inspection schedule can be examined to determine whether inspections are occurring. Defect-reporting and tag-out arrangements can be tested by looking at how a real defect is identified, isolated and escalated.

That creates a much better close-out question than "Has safety finished the notice?"

Ask instead: what evidence demonstrates that every required element is operating?

The distinction matters because regulatory compliance is not achieved merely by producing documents bearing the right titles.

If the notice requires a defect-reporting process, there should be a usable defect-reporting process.

If it requires inspections, somebody should be able to demonstrate how those inspections occur.

If it requires dangerous goods to be secured, the goods should be secured.

The close-out process should test the condition created by the corrective action, not just the existence of the action item.

A workable governance model

An organisation receiving a statutory notice should have a defined regulatory-action process.

At minimum, that process should ensure the notice is immediately registered, the legal entity and site are correctly identified, an accountable operational owner is appointed, senior management receives visibility appropriate to the risk, the required outcomes are translated into specific actions, and the compliance date is independently monitored.

It should also establish what evidence will be needed for close-out before people start doing the work.

Where meeting the date becomes doubtful, escalation should happen while there is still time to make a formal approach to the regulator and demonstrate what has already been done, what remains outstanding and how the risk is being controlled in the interim.

Finally, somebody other than the person who simply completed the action should verify that the notice has actually been satisfied.

The principle is not complicated:

1. Register the notice immediately.

2. Appoint an accountable manager with authority to make the required changes.

3. Define each required outcome and the evidence needed to demonstrate it.

4. Put interim controls in place where risk remains.

5. Monitor progress against the statutory compliance date.

6. Escalate emerging delay before the date expires.

7. Use the formal review or variation process where additional time is genuinely required.

8. Independently verify completion.

9. Confirm regulatory close-out and retain the evidence.

10. Review why the organisation needed regulatory intervention in the first place.

This is regulatory action management, not safety administration.

The $40,000 is not the important number

Chemical Solutions pleaded guilty and was fined. Those are established outcomes, and the penalties matter.

For another organisation, though, the more useful lesson sits earlier in the chronology.

An improvement notice removes a great deal of ambiguity.

The regulator has identified the issue. The organisation has been formally told that action is required. There is a compliance date. There is a legal consequence for not complying.

If that action can still become overdue without management escalation, the problem is no longer just the original hazard.

It is also the system the organisation relies upon to govern regulatory actions.

And senior management should want to know about that system before the inspector comes back.