Essential Practice 1: Effective and consistent quality assurance
Bodies exercising coercive powers should ensure that they have an effective quality assurance process that can identify the majority of significant errors (and repeated minor errors) before any powers are exercised on a person or entity. Resourcing dedicated to quality assurance should also accord with the volume of use and the risk profile of the powers being exercised.
Context
In our special report: ‘A compliance case study on the use and oversight of coercive powers’ (coercive powers special report), we reported that although we received a higher number of notifications from IBAC during this period, we consistently identified more compliance issues at the VO rather than IBAC.1
We considered that as issues frequently arose without being identified by the VO, this indicated that its quality assurance processes were either ineffective or not working as intended. The process resulting in the incomplete summonses discussed in Essential Practice 2 is one serious example of this.
To ensure that the VO committed sufficient internal resources to support staff to improve quality assurance and compliance, in the coercive powers special report we made a recommendation, which was accepted, that the VO undertake a review of its quality assurance framework and resources for supporting compliance when exercising coercive powers. Further details are in the VO section of our 2023-24 annual report.
Updated