Employer duties

What is a legal requirements register and how is it built?

The register is the written list of legal and other requirements binding the organisation; clause 6.1.3 of ISO 45001 asks for it. But writing legislation titles one under another is not a register. Each line needs four things: which provision, which practice meets it here, which record evidences it, and who owns it. Without the fourth, it is a table nobody has claimed.

Four fields per line

FieldIts question
ProvisionWhich law, regulation, communiqué; which article?
CounterpartWhich practice or process here meets it?
EvidenceWhich record shows it?
OwnerWho tracks it, who updates it?

A register with only the first column is a list of legislation; it has nothing to do with compliance itself.

What goes into it

  • laws, regulations, communiqués and other rules,
  • voluntary commitments: adopted standards, OHS clauses in customer contracts, sector rules,
  • permit, licence and authorisation conditions,
  • threshold duties arising from activity: hazard class, headcount, substance quantities.

Narrowing the scope

There are hundreds of rules; writing all of them makes the register unusable. The test is: does this provision apply to our activity? If not, it stays out — but the fact that it was considered and excluded should be recorded once. The difference between “we did not look” and “we looked, out of scope” shows up at an inspection.

A register is not a document list

The register holds provisions; the document list holds the records those provisions produce. They connect: a provision's counterpart is usually a document, and that document has a validity period.

How this stands in Optifora

The product holds 33 document types, their 29 validity rules and 155 clauses as records; a register line ties the provision to the record, so “where is the evidence for this provision” is answered in one click.

Manage this in Optifora

Optifora is not a single program but a compliance platform assembled from modules. The catalogue states which module is ready today and which is on the roadmap.

See what Optifora is