CER is committed to continuing its risk-based, intelligence-led approach to compliance; incorporating improved data analytics and intelligence insights to ensure a deeper understanding of the schemes, its participants, and the market in which each scheme operates. Responsibility for complying with scheme obligations always rests with the participants concerned.
Our approach includes helping scheme participants understand how to comply, educating those who want to do the right thing, and a commitment to deter, detect and respond to non-compliance and misconduct to ensure ongoing scheme integrity. Where appropriate, formal compliance action may be taken in the form of the acceptance of enforceable undertakings, the suspension of participants from schemes, initiating civil proceedings, or supporting the prosecution of persons by prosecutorial agencies. In taking these compliance actions, we take a proportionate, risk-based response to regulation in order to protect the public interest.
Compliance priorities support the agency’s wider objectives, priorities, and initiatives. An adaptive approach is reflected in our published annual compliance and enforcement priorities, which identify specific areas of focus for compliance and enforcement and are refined each year in response to shifts in industry practice and government policy settings. The priorities complement the data driven and risk-based approach to managing compliance in each scheme. The agency will use its full suite of compliance and enforcement powers to protect the integrity, and improve outcomes, of the schemes as reflected in our compliance policy for education, monitoring and enforcement activities.
In addition to the annual priorities, the agency will continue to detect and disrupt enduring forms of non-compliance. Those priorities include:
- false or misleading information being provided to the agency in relation to;
- claims for ACCUs,
- the creation of renewable energy certificates.
- inaccurate, incomplete, or late reports;
- by NGER reporters who have a history of non-compliance, particularly where data underpins safeguard obligations,
- by ACCU scheme project proponents in claims for ACCUs.
In addition, we will focus on other strategic compliance priorities, such as:
- ensuring only fit and proper persons are allowed to participate in our schemes and taking actions to remove participants who are not fit and proper,
- building relationships with other state, territory, and Commonwealth regulators to promote the sharing of information,
- targeted use of scheme audits, ensuring that the agency obtains scheme assurance without over-burdening participants,
- ensuring the integrity of carbon abatement initiatives, with a particular focus on human induced regeneration, and
- informing participants, and the public in general, of the agency’s compliance action, priorities and expectations through the publication of regular compliance updates.