Ethics and governance

As with any global company, there are occasions where incidents take place across a broad range of disciplines including safety, health, security, community and environment. In many cases, it is beneficial to share the details of these incidents across the company and share learning points arising from these incidents, globally.

In order to achieve this, the company is in the process of developing a system for the formalised reporting of incidents into a common electronic portal available to all AngloGold Ashanti sites around the globe. This process was driven by the isolation of incident reports in “silos” across the group, but never shared or discussed. It would be ideal if other employees could learn about the different types of incidents taking place at other sites, in order to provide learning and prevent repeat incidents.

“Until now, where there had been an incident at one of our mines, managers at other sites and especially in other disciplines would not get to share learning points from these events. There have been discipline-based reporting systems for some time, but these have not been coordinated,” explains John McEndoo, Manager: Safety.

A project team was tasked with setting up the framework for this system, made up of people from various disciplines in the organisation. The scope of the reporting system is being extended beyond solely safety to include health, environmental and security incidents.

“The task team has developed a draft policy on incident reporting, and is currently working on accompanying guidelines to explain the system to users. A pro-forma document for reporting incidents is also part of the system,” says McEndoo.

Incidents recorded on the system will be defined at different levels according to their severity and the policy framework will define what is reported and to whom the information gets distributed.

Once the new system is in place, when an incident occurs at an AngloGold Ashanti operation, the responsible official will record details into the system which will be managed by AngloGold Ashanti’s global security control centre. Security will then inform the relevant management at other sites. Records of these incidents will be kept on a global database, for subsequent analysis.

For Category One incidents, the highest impact events, it is planned that the notification period will be less than six hours from the incident occurring. Details pertaining to the incident will be constantly updated as new information becomes available.

The first phase of implementing the reporting system will be completed in the first quarter of 2009 and the second phase will be determined by the success of the first one.

“The long-term objectives of the system are to effect a decrease in repeat incidents, and to provide timeous and accurate information across a broad range of categories. When information on incidents is shared across all sites, these can be discussed and the relevant officials in the health, safety, security and environment disciplines can take steps to learn from these and reduce the likelihood of similar events recurring”, concludes McEndoo.