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Avoiding Liability from Security Mandates and Regulators with Integrated Management Systems
Michael Penders
President
Environmental Security International
www.esisecurity.com
International security mandates, guidelines, and regulatory requirements over the last three years have added complexity to the job of
maintaining compliance at significant manufacturing facilities and those considered a part of critical infrastructure. This is particularly
the case for corporations and facilities involved in international trade of goods that may pose harm to human health or the environment if
not managed in a safe and secure manner from the full range of generation, transport, use at a facility, and environmentally sound recycling or
disposal of hazardous wastes.
Before September 11th, it was difficult enough for corporate managers and counsel to manage compliance with the broad array of requirements from
an equally broad array of regulatory bodies on the state, local, federal, and international levels, including dozens of agencies involved in regulating trade at ports alone. Advances in environmental management systems in the last eight years have helped firms manage compliance, and indeed move beyond compliance to models of continuous improvement, pollution prevention, and inherently safer systems. Such systems, however, are only as good as the targets and objectives agreed to,
and only then if implementation meets performance goals on a continuous basis.
To the extent that management systems conforming to standards such as ISO 14001, ISO 17799, BSI 18001, NFPA 1600, among others,
included in their targets and objectives processes for assuring compliance with all legal requirements (which of course they must
to manage risk in a credible manner), they marked important milestones as international standards..
What any of these standards alone failed to do, however, was address risk in a comprehensive or integrated manner.
They could not provide managers or counsel with a means to prioritize relative risks in a meaningful way for business continuity,
or provide a basis for the “Strategic Sustainability” of the business itself. (more)
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