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Cooper Grace Ward offers customised legal compliance programs and systems, designed to protect you, your business, your Board and your senior management. We assist you in putting the right systems in place to comply with legislation around Trade Practices and Competition Law, Workplace Health and Safety, Privacy, and Anti Money Laundering.
Trade Practices Compliance
Marketing your products or services successfully is critical to your business. Doing so in a manner that does not offend against the Trade Practices Act is equally critical.
Those who have experienced a trade practices investigation by the ACCC know how time consuming, disruptive and upsetting it can be – to say nothing of the expense!
The management of such risks faced by your business is best achieved through a culture of compliance, by ensuring that all of your employees who could place the company at risk understand the way that competition law works.
Knowing how the law works, of course, is only the beginning. You need to continuously monitor change in the law and in your business. Regular sign-off on compliance offers protection to the Board and senior management and provides a facility to those involved in marketing activities to officially report problem areas as they arise. This approach provides everyone with protection through accountability.
To assist you in assessing your level of compliance with the Trade Practices Act, Cooper Grace Ward offers a Trade Practices Compliance Kit. The Kit helps you identify just how much risk your organisation is exposed to and where more education and understanding of the Trade Practices Act is required.
It is designed to test your employees’ understanding of the Trade Practices Act and will also enable your senior management to know what is understood about your organisation by those working in it. This includes employees who deal with industry associations, negotiate contracts, prepare marketing or advertising material, engage in selling activities or interface with those who do.
The Trade Practices Compliance Kit features an online, interactive assessment which includes seven ‘real life’ video scenarios covering a range of trade practices issues. After each video segment, the employee is asked to answer a range of questions about whether the scenarios shown break the law and, if so, what is the potential result.
The assessment takes approximately 30 minutes and generates a score for each employee who participates. It also identifies areas of the Act in which the employee’s knowledge or understanding needs strengthening.
Using this information, an employer can then offer employees appropriate customised training which will reduce the organisation’s risk exposure. If filed and used as reference documents, the first and all subsequent test reports can track the extent to which particular staff or areas of operation pose unacceptable risks.
Workplace Health & Safety (WH&S) Compliance
It sounds incredibly simple, but the secret to responding to a WH&S prosecution against your organisation is to have a system in place which complies with the WH&S law.
Cooper Grace Ward has been assisting Queensland businesses, government agencies and government owned corporations to develop and review their WH&S systems for more than 15 years. Our services are different from our competitors in that we focus not only on diagnosis of compliance issues, but also on developing a culture of compliance to protect your people and your organisation.
Through a series of interviews and questionnaires with your staff, we review your WH&S systems to:
- Determine your people’s understanding of their WH&S obligations
- Ensure you have a reporting mechanism to identify non-compliance issues and a process to escalate these issues to senior management
- Give you, your people and your organisation protection through accountability.
The outcomes of this type of review include improved safety for workers, reduced risk of injury, improved teamwork and morale, and the ability to demonstrate you are compliant with WH&S legislation. After all, your only defence against a WH&S prosecution is to demonstrate that you have a system in place to ensure compliance. Without this you have no defence and are at the mercy of the Court.
This often means severe fines for your organisation. In recent COAG meetings, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has stated that the impending move to a commonwealth scheme for WH&S will mean significantly increased fines for WH&S breaches in Queensland. This will potentially bring our fines into line with those in New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT.
The cost of a WH&S system review with Cooper Grace Ward is less than the cost of a fine for a single breach of the workplace health and safety legislation – making it a commercial and sensible investment.
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