Workforce Governance for Transport & Logistics

In aged care, workforce governance means proving care minutes were delivered by qualified staff. In transport and logistics, it means proving the driver who carried that load held a current licence, was within fatigue limits, had the right dangerous goods certification, and was paid correctly for the hours worked.

The regulatory framework is different. The evidence requirements are different. But the governance problem is identical: compliance evidence lives in five systems that don't talk to each other, and every regulator wants proof that crosses all of them.

Chain of Responsibility: everyone in the supply chain is liable

The Heavy Vehicle National Law (HVNL) established Chain of Responsibility (CoR) as the legal framework that holds every party in the transport supply chain accountable for safety outcomes. Not just the driver. Not just the operator. Everyone.

Under CoR, liability extends to:

• Consignors — the party that consigns goods for transport
• Schedulers — anyone who schedules transport activities
• Loaders and packers — parties responsible for loading vehicles
• Operators — the entity that operates the heavy vehicle
• Drivers — the person driving the vehicle
• Receivers — the party receiving the goods

The penalties are severe: up to $513,350 per offence for companies and $102,670 for individuals. Executive officers face personal criminal liability for systemic failures — not delegable, not insurable in all cases.

What makes CoR a governance problem rather than a compliance checkbox is its scope. When an NHVR investigator examines a fatigue breach, they don't just look at the driver's Electronic Work Diary. They look at who scheduled the run, what the delivery deadline required, whether the scheduler knew the driver's cumulative hours, and whether the operator had systems in place to prevent the breach. That evidence chain runs through the TMS, the WFM system, the EWD app, the credentialing database, and payroll. Five systems. No single system produces the evidence the investigator wants.

Fatigue management: the evidence that regulators actually check

Fatigue management under the HVNL operates under three schemes, each with progressively more flexibility and more stringent evidence requirements:

The governance failure that catches operators is not that their EWD system doesn't work. It does. The failure is that EWD records don't reconcile with payroll records.

Here's the scenario that triggers an investigation: a driver's EWD shows a mandatory rest period from 2:00 AM to 9:00 AM. Payroll shows the driver clocked in at 6:30 AM. Both systems are correct internally. The EWD recorded what the driver entered. Payroll recorded what the time clock captured. But the contradiction between them is evidence of either a fatigue breach (the driver worked during a rest period) or a payroll integrity issue (ghost hours). Either way, it's a governance failure — the systems operated independently with nobody reconciling the data between them.

Under BFM and AFM, the evidence requirements intensify. Operators must demonstrate not just that drivers complied with work/rest limits, but that they had systems in place to detect and prevent breaches before they occurred. That's a governance requirement, not an operational one.

Driver credentials: the gap between dispatch and compliance

Every dispatch decision is implicitly a compliance decision. When a scheduler assigns a driver to a load, they're asserting that the driver:

• Holds a current heavy vehicle licence (HC or MC class) appropriate for the vehicle
• Has a valid medical fitness certificate (renewed annually for drivers over 49, every 10 years otherwise)
• Holds current dangerous goods certification if the payload requires it
• Has valid forklift tickets if the delivery involves self-unloading
• Is within fatigue limits for the proposed journey
• Has completed any required site-specific inductions for the pickup or delivery location

In most transport operations, the TMS handles dispatch and the credentialing system (if one exists) handles licence tracking. They don't talk to each other. The scheduler checks credentials manually — or doesn't check at all, because the driver "always has their licence."

The governance gap is obvious: a driver's medical certificate expires on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, they're dispatched with a full load. The TMS doesn't know about the medical expiry because it doesn't read from the credentialing database. The credentialing database doesn't know about the dispatch because it doesn't read from the TMS. The lapse is discovered at a roadside intercept — by the NHVR, not by your own systems.

Under CoR, the scheduler who assigned that load, the operator who employed the driver, and potentially the consignor who set the delivery deadline are all liable. The defence is evidence that you had systems preventing non-compliant dispatch. If your TMS and credentialing database are disconnected, you don't have that evidence.

Criminal wage theft and the Road Transport Award

Since January 2025, Section 327A of the Fair Work Act makes intentional underpayment a criminal offence carrying up to 10 years imprisonment for individuals. The transport industry is structurally exposed because of award complexity.

The Road Transport and Distribution Award 2020 and the Road Transport (Long Distance Operations) Award 2020 contain provisions that most payroll systems handle correctly in isolation but that create underpayment risk at the system boundaries:

• Distance-based rates for long distance operations — payroll calculates correctly, but only if the distance data from the TMS is accurate
• Loading and unloading time — often captured in the TMS or by the driver, but truncated or excluded before it reaches payroll
• Meal allowances triggered by shift duration — requires accurate start/end times from WFM, which may differ from TMS dispatch times
• Overtime thresholds that depend on cumulative hours across the week — requires WFM to correctly aggregate hours across multiple dispatch assignments
• Casual conversion obligations — triggered by regular patterns of work that span the WFM, TMS, and payroll systems

The governance issue is that payroll applies the award correctly to whatever data it receives. If the upstream data from WFM or TMS is wrong — truncated breaks, excluded loading time, incorrect distance records — payroll faithfully processes the wrong inputs. The underpayment is systemic, not intentional, but under Section 327A, if you knew your systems had integrity gaps and failed to act, that constitutes wilful blindness.

The five-system evidence problem

Transport workforce governance is fundamentally a cross-system problem. Every regulatory requirement demands evidence that spans multiple systems:

No single system in the transport tech stack — not the TMS, not the EWD app, not the WFM platform, not the credentialing database, not payroll — produces all of this evidence on its own. Each system works. The spaces between them don't.

The four pillars of transport workforce governance

1. See it — Cross-system visibility

The foundation: a single, reconciled view of workforce data across TMS, WFM, EWD, credentialing, and payroll. Every dispatched load linked to the driver's credential status. Every fatigue record cross-referenced to payroll hours. Every award entitlement traced from its source data to the final pay run. Without this visibility, governance is guesswork.

2. Understand it — Compliance metrics and risk scoring

Raw visibility becomes governance when it's measured against regulatory thresholds. Fatigue compliance rates across the fleet. Credential currency percentages by licence type. Payroll variance rates between WFM hours and paid hours. CoR risk scores by route, by driver, by consignment. The metrics that tell you whether you're compliant today — not after the next roadside intercept.

3. Fix it — Pre-dispatch gating and automated intervention

Governance without the ability to prevent non-compliant operations is incomplete. Credential-to-dispatch gating that blocks assignment of a driver with a lapsed medical. Fatigue alerts that flag when a proposed schedule would breach work/rest limits. Payroll integrity checks that catch truncated breaks before the pay run processes them. The interventions that catch problems before they become CoR breaches.

4. Prove it — The CoR evidence ledger

The pillar that matters most when an investigator asks for evidence. An immutable, timestamped record of every compliance check, every credential verification, every fatigue reconciliation, every intervention — produced automatically as the governance system operates. When the NHVR asks "what systems did you have in place to prevent this?", the evidence ledger is the answer.

What NHVR investigators actually want to see

When an incident triggers a CoR investigation, NHVR investigators follow a specific evidence trail. Understanding what they look for is understanding what governance must produce:

1. The dispatch decision

Who assigned the driver to the load? What information did they have about the driver's fatigue status, credential currency, and vehicle fitness at the time of dispatch? Was there a system that verified compliance before dispatch, or was it manual?

2. The fatigue trail

EWD records for the driver covering the 14 days prior to the incident. Payroll records for the same period. Do they reconcile? Are there contradictions between recorded rest periods and paid work hours? Did the scheduling system account for cumulative fatigue across multiple assignments?

3. The credential chain

Was the driver's licence current at the time of the incident? Was their medical fitness certificate valid? If the load involved dangerous goods, was the DG certification current? When were these last verified, and by what system?

4. The systemic question

Did the operator have systems — not policies, systems — that would have caught the specific failure that led to the incident? If a credential lapsed, was there a system that would have prevented dispatch? If fatigue limits were breached, was there a system that would have flagged the schedule before it was issued? This is the governance question, and it's the one that determines whether penalties are operational or systemic.

NHVAS accreditation and governance requirements

The National Heavy Vehicle Accreditation Scheme (NHVAS) offers three modules: Mass Management, Maintenance Management, and Fatigue Management. Each requires operators to demonstrate not just compliance, but governance systems that ensure ongoing compliance.

For the Fatigue Management module specifically, NHVAS auditors examine:

• Scheduling procedures — documented systems that account for work/rest requirements when creating schedules
• Monitoring systems — how the operator monitors actual hours against scheduled hours and fatigue limits
• Record keeping — EWD records reconciled against other operational data
• Non-conformance handling — documented processes for when breaches are detected, including root cause analysis
• Management review — regular review of fatigue management system effectiveness by management

Every one of these requirements demands data from multiple systems. Scheduling procedures require TMS and WFM data. Monitoring requires EWD and payroll data. Record keeping requires cross-system reconciliation. NHVAS accreditation is, fundamentally, a governance accreditation.

Frequently asked questions

What is Chain of Responsibility in transport?

Chain of Responsibility (CoR) is a legal framework under the Heavy Vehicle National Law that holds every party in the transport supply chain liable for safety outcomes — not just the driver. This includes consignors, schedulers, loaders, packers, operators, and receivers. Penalties reach $513,350 per offence for companies and $102,670 for individuals. Executive officers face personal criminal liability for systemic failures.

What are the fatigue management requirements for heavy vehicle drivers?

Heavy vehicle drivers must comply with regulated work and rest hours under Standard Hours (12 hours max work in 24, 7 hours continuous rest), BFM (14 hours max, accredited fatigue system required), or AFM (flexible, full risk management system required). All schemes require Electronic Work Diary records. Governance requires reconciling EWD records against payroll clock data — contradictions between the two are evidence of systemic failure.

How is workforce governance different from fleet management?

Fleet management systems handle operational execution: dispatching loads, tracking vehicles, recording work hours. Workforce governance sits above these systems and asks: can you prove the driver who was dispatched held a current licence, was within fatigue limits, had valid DG certification for the payload, and was paid correctly? Governance is the cross-system evidence layer that connects dispatch to credentials to fatigue to payroll.

What do NHVR investigators look for?

NHVR investigators examine the dispatch decision (who assigned the driver, what compliance data they had), the fatigue trail (EWD vs payroll reconciliation for 14 days prior), the credential chain (licence, medical, DG cert currency at time of incident), and the systemic question (did the operator have systems that would have caught the specific failure). The systemic question determines whether penalties are operational or maximum.

What are the penalties for transport workforce governance failures?

CoR penalties reach $513,350 per offence for companies and $102,670 for individuals. Executive officers face personal criminal liability. Criminal wage theft under Section 327A carries up to 10 years imprisonment. NHVAS accreditation can be suspended or revoked. The combination of CoR, criminal wage theft, and personal executive liability makes transport one of the highest-risk sectors for workforce governance failures in Australia.

Related: What is Workforce Governance? (aged care focus) · Aged Care Compliance · Book a Governance Assessment