SafeWork NSW has been referred to a corruption watchdog after a scathing auditor’s report found it was not an effective work health and safety regulator.
Amid rising serious injuries in the state’s workplaces, the regulator has failed to use data strategically to make risk-based decisions while lacking transparency on its performance, a report by the NSW Auditor-General said.
The report used the regulator’s inertia to act on silica dust – which, like asbestos, causes fatal lung diseases – to demonstrate substantial issues.
The danger of respirable crystalline silica derived from manufactured stone was known by 2010 but SafeWork took until 2018 to start a substantial program of “active compliance and awareness building”, the auditor’s report said on Tuesday.
Even then, the regulator’s research arm promoted a real-time silica monitoring device despite substantial concerns about its efficacy and procurement.
The audit found tender responses were scored incorrectly, people with conflicts of interest were inappropriately involved in evaluating tenders and documents on the making of key decisions were missing.
It amounted to “potential maladministration due to significant flaws in procurement, project governance and risk management”, the report said.
“Only as a result of the audit office raising these issues with the head of SafeWork NSW, did SafeWork NSW undertake to enter into discussions with the CSIRO to conduct further testing of the real-time silica monitoring device.”
The audit office has referred the procurement process for the device to the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption.
A referral was also made by the Department of Customer Service, whose secretary gave the device an award in December 2022.
The report also exposed the regulator’s ageing information management system for being unable to efficiently extract and analyse data and being so poorly understood that extracted data could be misinterpreted.
The release of the withering report comes a week after a Supreme Court judge recommended the agency be made truly independent and to be overseen by a board that includes employer and employee representatives.
It was one of three agencies created following the abolition of WorkCover in 2015, which led to functions being spread across multiple departments.
The peak body for NSW unions described the auditor’s report as “an indictment on the organisation’s conduct for the last decade” and the need for further reform.
“We have an ineffective regulator presiding over a broken system, and as a result, workplaces are more dangerous than they need to be,” Unions NSW secretary Mark Morey said.
SafeWork NSW has been contacted for comment.
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