The audit was conducted between 28 April 2021 and 2 February 2022 and was focused on Equinor's management of working environment risk across facilities and installations.

Background

Previous audits of Equinor's offshore and onshore facilities have made repeated observations concerning weaknesses in Equinor's systemic working environment management, and in the practice of risk management at the facilities.

Following an audit of Grane in 2020, in addition to an order directed at Grane, an order was issued to review Equinor's systems for managing working environment risk across facilities and installations. These were combined in a single order dated 26 October 2020. 

Read more: Order for Equinor – Grane (2020)

Objective

The objective of the audit was to:

  • Assess whether Equinor's systems and practices relating to working environment risk are sufficient for achieving regulatory compliance.
  • Monitor the effect of improvement processes initiated by Equinor, following the order issued in the Grane audit, on working environment management at facilities and installations.

Our assessment included:

  • Relevant elements of the company's management system
  • The company's instruments and practices for managing working environment risk at facilities and installations
  • The company's capacity and expertise at various line and staff levels

Result

Our observations concern several elements of the management system, but one of the most important was that the necessary professional analyses and assessments for identifying risk were inadequately implemented. This led to further deficiencies in other elements of the management, which depend on the identification of risk.

Risk overview, decision support for measures, training and follow-up are examples of elements that were insufficiently addressed as a result of professional analyses and assessments of working environment risk being inadequately implemented.

In the audit report, we have chosen to combine most of our observations relating to the analysis of the working environment into a single non-conformity (5.1.1). The reasoning underpinning this non-conformity highlights what we consider the root causes of deficient management of working environment risk. In our opinion, other observations that were communicated at the summary meeting are "consequential errors" emerging from the reasoning for non-conformity 5.1.1. This non-conformity also contributes to the reasoning for non-conformity 5.1.2 concerning decision support.

The following regulatory non-conformities were identified:

  • Analysis of the working environment
  • Decision support
  • Non-conformity handling

What happens now?

We have asked Equinor to report to us by 1 December 2022 on how the non-conformities will be addressed.