In-house or external: who should be inspecting your racking
Nothing in the Australian racking guidance we have read says the formal inspection must be bought from outside. The competent-person test turns on knowledge and skills, not on whose payroll someone sits. What an external inspector adds is real, but it is different from what most people assume, and worth being precise about before you spend anything.
Last updated 2026-08-24
What the guidance leaves open
Every regulator publishing racking guidance asks for a competent person, and defines that — where it defines it at all — as someone with the knowledge and skills for the task, acquired through training, qualification or experience. Nothing in that formula mentions employment, and the routes into it are under the competent-person standard.
An employee can, in principle, be the competent person. It turns on whether that individual genuinely has the knowledge and skills, and whether you could explain why you believe so — a higher bar than sending a supervisor on a half-day course and writing their name on a form.
One claim deserves flagging. Some vendor pages say the 2023 edition of the Standard made the annual assessment an external-provider job. We have not verified it, no regulator guidance we have read says it, and it is worth noticing who benefits if it circulates: every business doing its own becomes a buyer. Detail under the absence of any licence or register.
What your own person genuinely has
Presence. Your warehouse manager is in the aisles every day; an external inspector is there for a few hours once. Damage appearing in March gets found in March, not in next February’s report.
They also know the building — which entry bay every truck clips, which run holds the heavy product, which driver has stopped reporting things. None of that is in a document. Internal attention is what makes reporting work at all, the same mechanism behind reporting near misses before they become incidents, and the truck that hit the upright is working the same aisle tomorrow.
What an outside inspector adds
Three things, none of them legal permission.
Independence, first: the person writing the findings has no history with the decision that caused them. Then breadth — someone inspecting a couple of hundred sites a year recognises the discontinued profile, the mixed-brand repair that will not source, and the load pattern producing the same dent at the same height.
And a document with someone else’s name on it. If an insurer, a landlord, a regulator or an incoming owner asks what has been done about racking, a dated series of external reports answers differently from an internal spreadsheet — because a third party wrote it. What either should contain is in the report you keep.
The conflict nobody names out loud
Many inspection providers also sell, install, repair or dismantle racking. That is where much of the expertise lives — but the person identifying which components need work may be the person quoting to supply them. That does not make the finding wrong, and a second opinion on the larger recommendations costs little. What that pricing is made of is under what a repair actually costs.
Ask three questions before engaging anyone: do you sell racking, do you quote the repairs you recommend, are you tied to particular manufacturers. Any answer is workable; not knowing is not. The rest are in how to pick a provider.
The mirror-image conflict exists internally and gets discussed far less: an in-house inspector reports to the person whose budget the repairs come out of, and whose operation slows while a run is unloaded. Independence is not automatic just because nobody is invoicing you.
How most operations settle it
They do both: internal attention between visits, an external formal inspection annually, and a rule about what triggers a call in between.
| Question | Your own person | An outside inspector |
|---|---|---|
| How often it can happen | Weekly or monthly, at no marginal cost | Usually annually |
| Knowledge of this specific building | High, and accumulating | Whatever can be learned in a few hours |
| Independence from the repair decision | Depends who they report to | Depends whether they also quote the work |
| Whose name is on the document | Yours | A third party’s |
| Cost | Time already on the payroll, plus training | A quoted fee, priced on pallet positions |
If you are building the internal capability
Do it properly or do not claim it: real training rather than a webinar, at least one walk alongside an external inspector, and a written record of what was looked at, where and when.
Give them the original rack layout drawings and load application data if you still have them, and legible signage on every run — signs that no longer match the configuration are among the most common findings anywhere, which is why what the load sign has to reflect earns its own page.
Then be honest about the boundary. An internal walk finds damage; deciding what that damage means for a structure carrying live load is a different judgement, and may still be the one you buy. Where your state sits is in what each regulator publishes, costs are in how inspections are priced, and if a provider calls theirs an audit, the difference between those words is smaller than it looks.
Common questions
- Can our warehouse manager do the formal racking inspection?
- The definition does not exclude an employee — it turns on knowledge and skills from training, qualification or experience. Whether a specific person meets it is a judgement you should be able to justify. Many operators use internal people for routine attention and buy the annual formal inspection.
- Is an external inspection legally required in Australia?
- No regulator guidance we have read says the formal inspection must be done by an external provider. A vendor claim to that effect circulates, attributed to the 2023 edition of the Standard, and we have not been able to verify it. Ask anyone asserting it which clause of which part they rely on.
- How do we evidence that our internal person is competent?
- Keep what you would want to show someone: what training they have done and when, what they have inspected and how often, and the records of their own walks. There is no register to point at, so the file you build is the evidence.
Sources
- WorkSafe Victoria — Pallet racking operation and maintenance — The competent person definition — knowledge and skills through training, qualification or experience — with no reference to employment status. Retrieved 2026-08-17.
- SafeWork NSW — Pallet racking guide — Formal inspections by a competent person at intervals not exceeding 12 months. Names no provider type and does not require an external one. Retrieved 2026-08-17.
- SafeWork SA — Pallet racking — Same competent person term, both 2023 parts of AS 4084 named, and no requirement as to who employs the person. Retrieved 2026-08-23.
- Australian Steel Institute — Code of Practice for Rack Safety Inspections — Industry practice guide addressing inspector competency. Cited for existence and scope only; it certifies nobody and keeps no register. Retrieved 2026-08-17.
Part of our guide to racking inspection.