Audit, Compliance and Risk Blog

When managing contractor safety, many hiring clients focus heavily on pre-qualification — confirming that a contractor has the right certifications, training, insurance, and safety programs in place. But pre-qualification is only the starting point. Once you’ve selected a contractor, the real work begins: onboarding, oversight and, in many cases, auditing.

 

Auditing your contractors can be one of the most effective ways to protect your people, manage liability, and ensure that safety commitments on paper are translating into real action on-site.

Pre-qualification tells you whether a contractor is fit to do business with your organization — that is, whether they’re set up to manage safety from an organizational standpoint. But once they’re pre-qualified, you move into contractor selection, and that’s where specificity becomes essential.

 

It’s the hiring client’s responsibility to define the scope of work in detail, identifying foreseeable hazards and clearly communicating them in bid packages and draft safety plans. If, for example, there’s known asbestos in the area of work, you should include your asbestos management plan — or at the very least the relevant portions of it. Contractors need that context in order to assess the risks and submit an appropriate bid.

Some organizations also offer a pre-bid site meeting, particularly for complex or high-risk projects. This gives contractors the chance to see the site, ask questions, and come back with a more realistic and informed proposal.

Once you’ve chosen a contractor, onboarding becomes your opportunity to clearly set expectations. This includes sharing your site’s emergency procedures, pointing out known hazards, and explaining any specific training or procedures you expect all workers to follow — especially if your internal standards exceed regulatory minimums.

 

Site-specific orientation is crucial here. Even if a contractor has general health and safety training, they still need to understand how things are done on your site. Whether it’s high-visibility gear, restricted zones, or lockout/tagout procedures, they need to be fully aligned with your safety systems before work begins.

After the contractor is mobilized, both parties share responsibility for safety on-site. The contractor is responsible for implementing their safety program and monitoring their workers, while the hiring client remains responsible for ensuring that site-wide safety requirements are met.  Ongoing oversight might include regular check-ins, site inspections, or the tracking of incidents, near misses, and hazard observations. These expectations should all be outlined in the project health and safety plan, including who does what and when.

Still, while many hiring clients and contractors conduct inspections, fewer take the next step: auditing.

Unlike inspections, which tend to be focused on immediate conditions, safety audits take a more holistic view. A proper audit involves observing work practices, speaking with workers, and reviewing documentation to get a complete picture of how well safety procedures are being followed.

 

For hiring clients, contractor audits provide a critical opportunity to ensure that the contractor’s commitments — the ones they made during prequalification and selection — are being lived out on-site. Audits show due diligence, offer insight into real-time risk exposure, and reinforce a safety culture that includes everyone, not just direct employees.

 

Yet despite their value, many hiring clients hesitate to audit contractors. Some worry that auditing could imply a transfer of responsibility — or even increase liability. While that’s a reasonable concern, it can be addressed through careful planning and clear documentation.

The key to balancing oversight and liability is to create a well-defined contractor audit program. This should clearly state when audits are required to be factored into the contractor project scope, who conducts them, and how findings are recorded and acted upon. With this kind of structure, site-level staff can make consistent decisions without second-guessing themselves — and you avoid the perception that audits are arbitrary or unfair.

 

Not every contractor needs to be audited, and not every project requires the same level of scrutiny. That’s why it’s helpful to establish clear criteria for when an audit makes sense.

Several factors can inform your decision to audit a contractor. The nature of the work is a major one — if the project involves high-risk activities like confined space entry or working at heights, an audit might be appropriate regardless of other variables.

Contract value is another consideration. Larger contracts often carry more liability and complexity, which can justify a closer look. So too can project duration; longer projects provide more opportunity for things to go wrong — or for safety performance to drift without oversight.

 

Location also plays a role. Some facilities or regions are subject to more frequent regulatory inspections, or are inherently higher-risk environments. In those cases, it may make sense to proactively audit contractors to stay ahead of potential compliance issues.

 

Even the contractor’s experience matters. If you’re working with a new or conditionally approved contractor, an audit might serve as an additional layer of assurance.

 

And finally, you need to consider your internal capacity. If you don’t have the resources to audit every contractor, you’ll need to prioritize based on risk.

Contractor audits aren’t about micromanaging or catching someone out. When done right, they’re a proactive tool for protecting your people, ensuring your standards are upheld, and reducing the overall risk profile of your organization.

 

By embedding audits into your broader contractor safety program, and by being thoughtful about when and why they’re used, you can create a system that supports everyone — including your contractors — in working safely and effectively.

STP AuditHub and RegApply tool helps hiring clients tailor audit checklists based on each contractor's scope of work and prioritized risks quickly and efficiently. Reach out to us today to learn more.

 

About the Author

Prior to joining STP as the Director of Partnerships in 2021, Shannon spent 14 years as an EHS consultant performing EHS compliance and management system audits, as well as implementing ISO 14001 and 45001 conforming management systems for organizations within the construction, manufacturing, health care and commercial retail industries. 

She is a trained ISO 14001 and 45001 Lead Auditor and a certified environmental auditor with ECO Canada.  She lives in Ontario, Canada with her family, where she loves to play any sport especially soccer.