Glossary

What if a duty comes from both legislation and a standard?

Where the same subject is governed by both legislation and an adopted standard, the stricter applies in practice. But it is not collapsed into one register line: if the certificate is dropped, the requirement from the standard falls away and the legal one does not. An organisation that merges the two sources cannot tell, on the day it drops the certificate, which duty survives.

In practice: the stricter one

If legislation requires an annual drill and the standard you adopted requires one every six months, you do it every six months. Applying the stricter meets both and removes the need to do the work twice.

In the record: two lines

Even with a single practice, the register keeps two lines:

  • the requirement from legislation — mandatory, cannot be dropped,
  • the requirement from the standard — voluntary, falls away if the certificate is dropped.

Collapsing them leaves it unclear what remains on the day the certificate goes.

Which is stricter is not always obvious

Sometimes one increases frequency and the other increases scope. Then both are met — “we follow the standard” cannot justify missing a different aspect of the law.

Contract as a third source

Requirements from a contract follow the same logic and get their own line: they fall away when the contract ends, and they bind — and get asked about at audit — for as long as it runs.

The source column

This is why one of the most useful columns in a register is source: mandatory · adopted · contractual. A single three-valued field makes every question above answerable.

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.

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