Chain of Responsibility (CoR): Who's Liable and What to Document

Chain of Responsibility (CoR): Who's Liable and What to Document

Chain of Responsibility is the part of Australia's Heavy Vehicle National Law that surprises people who don't drive trucks: you can breach it from an office. The consignor who books an impossible delivery window, the loader who overloads an axle, the scheduler whose run plan only works at 110 km/h, the executive who never asked for a compliance report — all parties in the chain, all carrying duties, all prosecutable. Since the 2018 amendments, penalties run to millions for corporations and potential imprisonment for individuals in the worst categories.

Here's the duty map in plain English, and a free self-assessment checklist to find your gaps.

Who's in the Chain

If your business does any of these, you're a CoR party — whether or not you own a single truck:

• Consignor / consignee — sends or receives the goods
• Packer — packs goods for transport
• Loader / unloader — puts freight on or takes it off
• Scheduler — plans routes, times, and driver rosters
• Operator — runs the vehicles
• Loading manager — manages the loading premises

A manufacturer shipping product interstate touches four of those roles without employing a driver.

The Primary Duty

Each party must ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, the safety of their transport activities. It's a positive, proactive duty modelled on WHS law — not "don't cause a breach" but "identify your risks and control them." The practical duty areas:

• Vehicle standards and maintenance — roadworthy vehicles, documented maintenance systems
• Mass, dimension and loading — legal weights, documented load plans and restraint
• Speed — schedules and monitoring that don't create pressure to speed
• Fatigue — work/rest hours planned within limits, trip plans that are actually achievable

The word carrying the load is documented. "We tell drivers to rest" is not a control; a rostering procedure with records is.

Executive Due Diligence

Executives — directors, partners, senior managers who influence the transport function — carry a personal due diligence duty that can't be delegated away: keep current knowledge of transport safety matters, understand the business's operations and risks, ensure resources and processes exist to manage them, and verify those processes are used. An executive who receives no compliance reporting isn't insulated by ignorance — the missing report is the breach.

What Good Evidence Looks Like

CoR compliance reduces to a documentation architecture:

The checklist walks the fifteen control questions auditors reach for first — one per duty area — with an action log for the gaps.

The Practical Starting Point

Most businesses assessing themselves find the same result: the physical work happens, the evidence doesn't. Trucks get checked but checks aren't recorded; faults get fixed but the repair trail is a text message; executives care but nothing reports to them. That gap between doing and documenting is precisely what a CMMS closes for the maintenance pillar — checks completed on mobile with timestamps, faults escalating through a visible queue, services recurring automatically, and a compliance dashboard an executive can actually be shown. Which converts the due-diligence duty from an awkward conversation into a standing report.