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As Australia is fast becoming one of the most litigious places in the world, each and every scheme must ensure that it has appropriate risk management strategies in place.

The Strata Agency plays an active role in assisting schemes manage and understand their associated risks whilst ensuring compliance with their legal obligations.

We are continually reviewing different risk management strategies, in an effort to provide greater protection for our clients.

One of the strategies adopted by The Strata Agency saw the appointment of Trades Monitor. Trades Monitor is a specialist trade compliance organisation, who verify, maintain and keep current the status of all service providers that our clients may look to engage.

Under the various state Occupational/Workplace Health and Safety (OH&S) Acts and Regulations, employers and controllers of workplaces are responsible for the safe work practices of their employees and contractors. This obligation also arises under common law duty of care.

Most schemes try to ensure that any contractors that do work for them are correctly licensed, insured, OH&S compliant and inducted. This covers all contractors whether full time, part time or ad-hoc (such as tradespeople). This is a very time consuming task that requires great expertise.

If a scheme is not doing this themselves, or doing this inadequately, they are already in breach of the OH&S Acts and Regulations and if anything goes wrong with a contractor they are using, they can face two consequences. Firstly, they may face action by Workcover resulting in personal fines (not coverable by insurance) and/or possible prison sentences for breach of the OH&S Act. Secondly, the contractor can make a claim against the scheme’s public liability cover, and the scheme may be found to be contributory negligent and have to contribute to the claim.

Trades Monitor’s process is about helping our clients prevent accidents where possible and also helping our clients avoid liability when an accident does occur.

Trades Monitor contacts all of your schemes contractors on your behalf. Trades Monitor’s unique qualifying system ensures the absolute highest level of verification available. All documents are electronically stored for easy retrieval and are verified where possible. Trades Monitor’s qualification process has 5 steps:

Step 1: Verify that the ABN is correct and relates to the name the contractor uses.

Step 2: Verify that the insurance (public liability, professional indemnity, Work Cover) is held in the ABN entity or a trading name thereof.

Step 3: Verify that the right licenses/registrations are held. This is dependent on:-

the trade/profession undertaken,
the business structure (sole trader, partnership, company, trust) and
the state where the work is performed.

Step 4: Trades Monitor’s risk management specialists code each contractor as compliant or non-compliant. Non-compliant contractors are notified of reasons and provided assistance and guidance to comply.

Step 5: Trades Monitor automatically re-contacts all contractors upon expiry of documentation in order to always have the most current information available.

Once the qualification process has been completed, the information is exported onto The Strata Agency’s management systems, which immediately identifies each contractor as either compliant or non-compliant.

If you would like more information regarding this service, please contact us