WHS Duties for Directors and Business Owners Explained (2026)

If you run a company in Australia, there are two safety duties in play, not one.

The business holds the primary duty to provide a safe workplace. Separately, the company's officers hold a personal duty to exercise due diligence to make sure the business actually meets it. Two duties, enforced separately. An officer can be convicted whether or not the business is.

That second duty is the one most small business owners have never read, and it's the one you can't hand over to anybody else.

You can delegate the work, not the duty

You can hire a consultant. Appoint a safety coordinator. Buy a complete WHS system and roll it out properly. All sensible, and all of it helps you meet the duty.

None of it transfers the duty. Regulator guidance puts it about as plainly as it can be put: officers may delegate tasks and rely on credible advice, but they cannot delegate the duty.

Due diligence is assessed on what you did, not on what you bought. A manual sitting unopened on a shared drive is evidence about you rather than for you. So is a safety coordinator who was appointed once and never spoken to again. The law is interested in whether you took reasonable steps, and buying something is only a step if you then did something with it.

Who is an "officer"?

This is where a lot of small businesses get caught, because officer isn't a job title. It's a test.

It covers directors and company secretaries. It also covers anyone who makes, or takes part in making, decisions that affect the whole or a substantial part of the business, anyone with the capacity to significantly affect the company's financial standing, and anyone whose instructions the directors are accustomed to following.

In practice, in a business of ten or fifteen people, that can reach past whoever appears on the ASIC record:

• A two-director electrical company where one director runs the tools and the other runs the office. Both are officers. The one on the tools doesn't get a reduced duty for being busy, and the one in the office doesn't get out of it for never visiting site.
  

• A landscaping business with an operations manager who decides what equipment gets bought, which jobs get taken, and how crews are scheduled. That's participation in decisions affecting a substantial part of the business, whatever the title on the payslip says.
  

• A small manufacturer where the owner's spouse handles the books and signs off on spending. If they're deciding what the business can and can't afford, including what it spends on safety, they may well be carrying this duty without ever having heard of it.
  

The point isn't to alarm anyone. It's that the duty attaches to decision-making power, and in small businesses that power is often spread wider than the paperwork suggests.

If you're a sole trader or in a partnership

Two useful exclusions.

Partners in a partnership can't be prosecuted under this duty. Each partner already carries the business duty directly, and the law isn't interested in charging the same person twice for the same failure.

Sole traders aren't officers either, because you are the business. There's no separate officer duty to add on top, since you're already holding the primary duty yourself.

Neither of these is a lighter position. If anything it's more direct. The primary duty is the bigger one, and you're carrying it without a corporate structure between you and it. What changes is the mechanism, not the exposure.

Volunteers holding officer roles are also excluded from prosecution under this duty, which matters for community organisations, sporting clubs and not-for-profits run by volunteer boards.

The six steps due diligence actually requires

Here's the substance. Officers must take reasonable steps to do all six.

1. Keep your own WHS knowledge current. You don't need to become a safety professional, but you do need to know what applies to your business and to stay across changes. Reading this counts. So does a subscription to your regulator's updates.

2. Understand your operations and their hazards. Not a general awareness that construction is dangerous. An actual understanding of what your people do, where the risk sits, and what could realistically go wrong on your jobs.

3. Make sure the business has, and uses, the resources and processes to manage risk. Both halves matter. Having a system and using it are different things, and the second one is what this asks for.

4. Make sure information reaches you, and gets acted on. There must be a way for incidents, hazards and risks to travel up to the people making decisions, and a response that happens promptly. If your workers report a problem to a supervisor and it stops there, this step isn't met.

5. Make sure there are processes for meeting the business's legal obligations. Consultation, training, notifying the regulator, responding to notices. Processes, not intentions.

6. Verify that all of the above is actually happening. This is where most officers come unstuck.

Verifying feels like distrust, so it gets skipped. It isn't distrust. It's the difference between believing your system works and knowing it does. Asking your supervisor whether toolbox talks are running is not verification. Looking at the attendance records is.

"I'm not a safety expert"

This is the most common objection, and it misunderstands what's being asked.

The duty doesn't require you to be a safety expert. It requires you to take reasonable steps, and the six steps above are about governance rather than technical knowledge. Knowing whether a scaffold is compliant is a technical question you can pay someone to answer. Knowing whether anybody in your business is checking scaffolds, and being able to show it, is a governance question, and that one's yours.

Put another way: nobody expects a director to diagnose a machinery fault. They do expect the director to know whether the business has a maintenance system and whether anyone's using it.

If you're in Victoria

Victoria works differently, and it's worth knowing how.

There's no standing due diligence duty in the Victorian OHS Act equivalent to the one described above. Instead, an officer can be convicted where a contravention by the business is attributable to that officer failing to take reasonable care.

Different mechanism, same practical answer. The six steps remain the clearest way for a Victorian officer to demonstrate they took reasonable care, which is why Victorian officers are commonly advised to use them as a guide even though they aren't a standing statutory duty there.

What this looks like in a small business

Three habits cover most of it.

Put a safety review in the diary. Quarterly is a reasonable starting point for most small businesses. The value of a diarised review is that it happens without something bad prompting it.

Keep the record. What you reviewed, what you found, what changed, and when. Due diligence that leaves no trace is very hard to demonstrate later, and demonstrating it is the entire point of the exercise.

Ask for evidence, not reassurance. "Yeah, all good" is not verification. "Here's the inspection form from last month" is.

None of that requires a safety qualification. It requires about half a day a quarter and the discipline to write things down.

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Get the leadership side documented

Every Everything OHS WHS Manual covers leadership and worker participation, which is where an officer's due diligence gets documented and evidenced, and also covers how your organisation is structured and who holds what responsibility. Together they give you something to point at when the question is what system you had in place.

See our WHS Management Systems →

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