Due diligence (officer)
Also known as: s27 due diligence
Officer due diligence is the personal duty owed by officers (directors, CEOs, executives) under s27 of the model WHS Act. It is six steps: acquire knowledge, understand operations, ensure resources, ensure incident response, ensure compliance with duties, and verify all the above.
Legal context
Section 27 of the model WHS Act imposes a positive duty on officers to exercise due diligence to ensure the PCBU complies with its WHS duties. The duty is personal — it does not delegate down to safety managers or up to the board as a whole. The Act sets out six limbs: (a) acquire and keep up-to-date knowledge of WHS matters; (b) gain an understanding of the nature of operations and the hazards / risks associated with them; (c) ensure the PCBU has appropriate resources and processes to eliminate or minimise risks; (d) ensure the PCBU has processes for receiving and considering incident, hazard and risk information; (e) ensure the PCBU implements processes for complying with its duties; and (f) verify the provision and use of the resources and processes in (a)–(e). Industrial manslaughter laws in Vic, Qld, ACT, SA, WA and NT now carry significant individual penalties (including imprisonment) for officers who fail this duty in the context of a workplace death.
Practical use
Due diligence is what an Officer Verification Report should evidence on a quarterly cadence: attendance at WHS briefings, review of metrics, sign-off on resourcing, response to incident reports, and named verification of the safety system's operation. RAE IQ's Officer module generates the per-officer dossier and board-level summary expected by a court.
Regulator references
The binding-law and regulator-guidance sources behind this term.
Common questions
Who counts as an "officer"?
The model WHS Act adopts the Corporations Act 2001 definition: directors, secretaries, and people who participate in making decisions that affect a substantial part of the business or who have the capacity to significantly affect the corporation's financial standing. In practice this means the C-suite plus any executive making strategic resourcing decisions.
Can an officer delegate due diligence?
No. The duty is personal. An officer can rely on the work of others (e.g. a safety manager), but cannot transfer the legal duty. Reliance must itself be reasonable — if a safety manager's reports are obviously incomplete, "I relied on the manager" is not a defence.
Where this shows up in RAE IQ
Related terms
PCBU
PCBU stands for Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking — the primary duty-holder under model WHS legislation in Australia. It is broader than “employer”: a PCBU can be a company, a sole trader, a partnership or an unincorporated association, and the duty applies whether or not workers are paid.
Industrial manslaughter
Industrial manslaughter is a state-level criminal offence covering workplace deaths caused by negligent or reckless conduct of a PCBU or senior officer. It now exists in Vic (2020), Qld (2017), ACT (2003), NT (2019), SA (2024), WA (2022) — with NSW the only mainland holdout as of mid-2026.
Primary duty of care
The primary duty of care (model WHS Act s19) is a PCBU's overarching duty to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers and other persons at the workplace. It is the foundation duty from which most other WHS obligations flow.
Platform pillars
Browse the full glossary.
47 WHS and HSWA terms with legal context, FAQs and regulator references.