The Volkswagen emission issue and risk management

I had posted this question to a group in Linkedin: "The ongoing Volkswagen emission issue raises a bigger issue of corporate risk management. From a reading of its annual report, the company did have in place all risk management controls, yet the issue took place. While only a deeper investigation will reveal the details, what is your take on improving risk management? We in the chemical Industry deal with process safety risks among other things and the incident does raise an alarm bell about corporate risk management and its effectiveness". 

Nigel Cann (Process Safety and Dangerous Goods Risk Specialist, Australia) responded with this very good reply:

"Karthikeyan - this is a good topic for this group. I wonder how many people in the PSM field have seen this incident playing out in the news and thought it doesn't apply to them. High profile cases like this need to be taken as the warning for the rest of us that they are. So like every incident that makes the headline, have you (and everyone else) thought about how things could go wrong in the plants and processes that I am responsible for.

Some thought provoking questions for people:

* Where have we met the letter of the law, rather than addressing the spirit of it?

* Have we had a problem that was causing issues at high level that seemed to magically disappear? Do we understand why?

* Do we have people checking the checkers?

And one that I had a concern for when a GM at an operating plant:
* Are the regulators technically competent to give me a critical assessment of my PSM system? (or in some cases...)

* Do they even turn up to review our operation?"
 
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