Step 4.3 Evaluate compliance with legal and other requirements
This step is relevant to section 4.6.2 of the ISO 50001-2011 standard.
On a routine basis you need to evaluate your organization’s compliance with the legal and other requirements that apply to its energy use, consumption and efficiency. These requirements should have been identified in Step 2.1. The purpose of evaluating compliance is to ensure that your organization is meeting those requirements, and when it is either not meeting or has the potential of not meeting the requirements, appropriate action is taken.
How to do it
There are three tasks needed to evaluate compliance with legal and other requirements:
4.3.1 Establish a schedule and assign responsibilities
Compliance with legal and other energy related requirements subscribed to by your organization must be evaluated at planned intervals. There is no required frequency; you determine the appropriate interval for the evaluations. The planned intervals may be different for different sets of requirements. Although compiling and submitting required regulatory reports generally is not considered evaluation of compliance with legal requirements, decisions on planned internal schedules for compliance evaluations typically take into account the required timing for such reports.
It is imperative that roles, responsibilities and authorities for planning, conducting and maintaining the results of compliance evaluations are defined and communicated to the appropriate personnel. Depending on the type of legal and other requirements that apply, compliance evaluation responsibilities and authorities may be dispersed across multiple positions. For example, the Environmental Manager may have overall responsibility for evaluating compliance for legal requirements that involve both environmental and energy issues, while the Energy Manager may be responsible for evaluating compliance with the energy requirements of local building codes.
It is possible that your organization has processes for periodic auditing or evaluation of compliance already in place. For example, such processes may be in place for environmental or safety and health requirements. Appropriately leveraging any existing processes can be a more efficient use of resources than starting from scratch to create a process.
In summary, the key elements of planning for periodic evaluations of compliance with legal and other requirements include:
Identifying any existing compliance evaluation processes;
Determining whether the existing processes should be modified to include compliance evaluations for energy-related legal and other requirements, or whether separate compliance evaluation processes are needed;
Assigning roles, responsibilities and authorities for conducting the evaluations of compliance and for maintaining the results (i.e. records); and
Establishing an appropriate frequency or interval for conducting the compliance evaluations.
4.3.2 Conduct compliance evaluations
Consider either developing or obtaining checklist tools to assist in the compliance evaluation process. Checklists for auditing legal requirements (particularly for federal regulations) are often available either commercially or on the Internet. Customized checklists can be created by taking each requirement and developing questions than can be asked or evidence to be examined (e.g., records) to determine whether that requirement is being met. The Compliance Evaluation Checklist can be a useful starting point for the development of customized checklists.
When evaluations of compliance determine that one or more requirements are not being met, corrective action is taken to eliminate the problem. Sometimes a situation may exist where there is no evidence of a nonconformity, but there are indications that a potential problem could arise based on current conditions. In this case, initiating a preventive action to further investigate the issue and take any needed actions is often appropriate. See Step 4.5 for additional information on corrective action and preventive action.
The results of these evaluations must be reviewed by top management as part of the management review process. Step 5.1 provides information about the management review process.
4.3.3 Maintain records of results
The results of the compliance evaluations must be recorded and maintained. How the results are recorded, including the format and level of detail, is up to you. One approach is to prepare a high level summary that indicates whether or not concerns or non-compliances were found and whether or not corrective or preventive actions to address them have been undertaken and completed.
Resources & Examples
The following resource can provide the basis for developing customized checklists for use in conducting evaluations of compliance:
The following resource is designed primarily for organizations that plan to seek third-party certification to ISO 50001-2011. It helps you understand how to check and use your EnMS records to demonstrate the implementation of the system (you are doing what you say), and the effectiveness of the system in generating the intended results (what you are doing is working).
