What is officer due diligence under the HSWA 2015?

It is the personal, non-transferable legal duty of company Officers (such as Directors and CEOs) to proactively ensure that the business is meeting its health and safety obligations. This means Officers must actively acquire knowledge of workplace risks and verify that adequate resources and processes are in place to eliminate or minimise them.

Can a Director be held personally liable for a workplace incident?

Yes. If an Officer fails to exercise their duty of due diligence and a serious incident occurs, they can be personally prosecuted by WorkSafe New Zealand, facing severe financial penalties or even imprisonment, regardless of whether they were physically present at the site.

How do we stop our board reports from being just administrative noise?

You overhaul your reporting to focus on leading indicators and critical risk verification. IMPAC works with executive teams to redesign board packs so they highlight whether physical, life-saving controls are actually functioning, stripping away the clutter of minor, non-critical hazard reporting.

Is your Board actually leading, or just reacting?

Contact IMPAC’s advisory team today to schedule a confidential discussion regarding your health and safety governance. Ensure your executive team is meeting its legal duties and driving genuine operational safety.

Health and Safety Governance & Leadership Advisory NZ | IMPAC | IMPAC

Health and Safety governance and leadership

If your Board of Directors only discusses health and safety to review a lagging injury rate at the end of a meeting, you are fundamentally failing your legal duty of due diligence. Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, you cannot outsource your liability. Handing safety off to the HR department or hiring a manager does not protect the executive team from prosecution if a catastrophic incident occurs. Good intentions don’t keep workers alive, and a stack of unread safety policies will not protect an Officer in Court.

At IMPAC, we provide uncompromising governance and leadership advisory designed specifically for Boards, CEOs, and executive teams. We strip away the corporate fluff and equip your leaders with the exact strategic tools needed to interrogate operations, verify critical controls, and engineer a genuinely resilient safety culture from the top down.

The illusion of boardroom safety

Many executive teams operate under a highly dangerous illusion of safety, fuelled by administrative noise. When a Board is fed reports detailing every minor scrape, twisted ankle, and paper cut, they become bogged down in the minutiae.

H&S failure so often starts at the top. When directors spend their time reviewing vanity metrics, the noise drowns out the critical risks. The Board remains blind to the failing machine guards, the toxic workplace culture, or the dynamic hazards that are actually threatening their workforce. If your governance reporting does not clearly tell you whether the physical controls isolating your workers from fatal harm are actually functioning, your reporting is broken.

The IMPAC approach: Uncompromising due diligence

We believe that beefing up your commitment to health and safety does not mean complicating your board packs. It means cutting through the clutter to focus ruthlessly on what matters.

Our senior consultants act as expert sounding boards for your executive team. We don’t just tell you what the law says; we teach you how to practically apply it. We coach your leaders on exactly what questions they must ask site managers, how to spot a weak administrative control, and how to demand verifiable proof that critical risks are being managed on the floor. We bridge the massive gap between boardroom intent and frontline reality.

What our Governance Advisory delivers

We provide tailored, high-level strategic interventions to ensure your executive team is legally protected and operationally effective:

Executive coaching and mentoring: One-on-one or group advisory for Directors and Officers to deeply understand their personal, non-transferable duties under the HSWA 2015.
Board reporting overhaul: We review and rebuild your executive safety reporting, stripping out the meaningless administrative data and replacing it with leading indicators that accurately reflect your critical risk profile.
Strategic alignment: We help leadership teams align their commercial goals with their health and safety obligations, ensuring that operational pressures do not silently override safety protocols.
Due diligence verification: We provide independent assurance to the Board that the PCBU's Health and Safety Management System (HSMS) is actively functioning and effectively resourced.