The audit was conducted from 8 November 2024 to 15 January 2025.
Objective
The objective of the audit was to follow up on how, given the aim of avoiding major accidents, the company challenges current governance practices, so that it identifies and addresses any systemic weaknesses early enough.
Background
The ability of companies to challenge their own governance practices can be key to avoiding major accidents. Safety-critical issues can be overlooked or underestimated over time, not least due to inadequate challenges to their governance practices within companies’ follow-up and improvement processes.
We have been following up on Equinor’s corporate-level processes to challenge its own governance practices, by means of various supervisory activities since 2020. The regulatory requirements make it necessary to determine whether what is being done functions as intended. We have tried to understand how knowledge and experiences from major accidents are used in the company’s efforts to challenge established approaches and processes.
The topic of the audit, how the company determines the coherence between governance practices and the aim of avoiding major accidents, is a wide-ranging one. It is natural that supervisory activity would cover only parts of the topic. The audit was therefore process based. We looked at sub-activities in context and assessed the information as a whole.
Result
No non-conformities or improvement points were identified during the audit.