What you're signing when you sign an AFSS declaration

If you manage buildings in New South Wales, you sign Annual Fire Safety Statement declarations — possibly dozens a year, possibly hundreds. This page is about what that signature actually commits you to, and about two things the paperwork in front of you does not show.

It is not an argument that you have been doing it wrong. The gap described here is structural: it exists because nothing in the process was designed to close it.

The declaration is yours, by design

Under s88(1) of the Environmental Planning and Assessment (Development Certification and Fire Safety) Regulation 2021, an Annual Fire Safety Statement is issued by or on behalf of the owner — and FPA Australia's good practice guidance states that the assessing practitioner must not make the owner's declaration.

So the declaration falls to the owner or the owner's authorised agent. In a professionally managed scheme, under delegation from the owners corporation, that is usually you.

What you are attesting to, in the regulation's own terms, is that each essential fire safety measure specified in the statement has been assessed by an accredited practitioner as capable of performing to a standard no less than the schedule specifies, and that the building was inspected and found not to disclose grounds for a prosecution under Part 15.

Read that once more with the emphasis where it matters: each measure. Not the building generally. Not the measures the practitioner happened to look at. Each measure on the Fire Safety Schedule.

Three clauses worth having at hand, because they set the timing you are certifying against:

• s88(2) — the assessment and inspection must have been carried out within the 3 months before the statement is issued. The clause prohibits issuing a statement on an assessment older than that, so the date on the assessment is worth checking before you sign.
• s89(2) — the statement is due within 12 months of the previous one being given to council.
• s89(3) — failure to give it on time is a separate offence for each week it continues. The duty is the owner's, at a maximum of 800 penalty units for a corporation — A$88,000 at the current A$110 penalty unit, available per week of delay. That is a maximum on prosecution, not a routine outcome, and it is separate from the on-the-spot notices councils issue.

The two things the paperwork doesn't show you

You receive a completed statement, an invoice, and an accreditation number — the practitioner's details are on the statement because s92(1)(b)(xi) requires them to be. What you cannot see from those three documents:

1. Whether that practitioner's endorsements actually cover the building's measures

Accreditation under the Fire Protection Accreditation Scheme is granted measure by measure, across 36 endorsement categories. A practitioner may assess only what they are endorsed for. FPA Australia's own good practice guidance says an owner may need to engage more than one accredited practitioner for a single building.

The mismatch is not rare. Across the 1,044 practitioners accredited in NSW, no measure is held by more than 70% of them, and the median measure is held by under half. The engineered systems in larger buildings — level 2 hydrants, level 2 suppression, standby power, smoke dampers, mechanical air handling — sit between 27% and 43%.

Nothing in the statement tells you whether the person who signed it was endorsed for everything on your schedule. Nobody in the chain checks. The regulator's mechanism is to search the register; the good practice guide contains no verification procedure beyond clarifying scope in the contract.

2. Whether the practitioner has been disciplined

FPA Australia publishes a Notice of Decision Register — 114 published disciplinary decisions as at 14 September 2026.

47 of them are for completion of regulated work without the correct accreditation. Add the related categories and it is 51 — 45% of every decision the scheme has published.

That register is separate from the accreditation register, and searching one does not search the other. A practitioner whose accreditation has been terminated simply stops appearing on the accreditation register — the search returns "no data found", exactly as it would for a typo.

What a defensible check looks like

It takes about ten minutes per building and produces the only evidence that you did it.

1. Open the Fire Safety Schedule and list the measures.
2. Look the practitioner up on the Fire Safety Assessment Practitioners Register by accreditation number, not by name.
3. Expand the record and compare their endorsements against the schedule, line by line.
4. Search the Notice of Decision Register for the same accreditation number.
5. Record what you searched, what came back, and the date. This is the part that matters.

Step 5 is the whole point. Accreditation is valid for one year, so a register entry is evidence about one day only. A dated note of what the register said on the day you signed is worth considerably more later than a memory of having looked.

The full method is set out here, and the endorsement coverage figures are here.

What this does not ask you to do

Worth being explicit, because the obligation is often overstated:

• You are not certifying anything. Certifying a fire safety measure is a licensed activity and it is not yours. You are checking a public register and recording what it said.
• You are not second-guessing the practitioner's work. Whether the assessment was done well is not a question a register can answer and not one you are being asked.
• A scope gap is not a finding against anyone. If the endorsements do not cover every measure, the ordinary answer is a second practitioner for the remainder. That is what the good practice guidance anticipates.
• This is not a reason to change contractor. In most cases the incumbent is endorsed for most of the schedule, and the gap is a handful of measures somebody else needs to cover.

Why it is worth ten minutes

Councils treat late or incomplete statements as an enforcement matter. Inner West Council, as one published example, lists on-the-spot penalties of A$1,000 to A$4,000 per week for a late or incomplete statement and A$3,000 to A$6,000 for failure to maintain measures. Check your own council's schedule; these are published locally, and they sit well below the statutory maximums above.

But the fines are not really the point. The point is that if a statement is ever questioned — by an insurer, at a tribunal, by an owner who has engaged their own advisor — the question will be what you relied on and what you checked. A dated record of the register search is a complete answer to that question. Its absence is not.

At portfolio scale

One building is ten minutes. Eighty schemes is a fortnight of someone's year, and the largest firms manage several hundred.

The practical problems compound: accreditation expires on a rolling basis across the portfolio, so a practitioner verified in March may have lapsed by the time the next building they service comes due; statement due dates are scattered across the calendar; and a check performed and not recorded is, for evidentiary purposes, a check not performed.

That is a tracking problem rather than a compliance question, and it is worth naming as one.

Sources

• Environmental Planning and Assessment (Development Certification and Fire Safety) Regulation 2021 — s78, s79, s88, s89, s92, Part 15. Read on legislation.nsw.gov.au, 14 September 2026.
• FPA Australia, Good Practice Guide GPG-04, Fire Safety Statements — New South Wales, version 3, August 2024.
• FPA Australia, Fire Safety Assessment Practitioners Register and Notice of Decision Register — counts read 14 September 2026.
• Inner West Council — published penalty schedule, cited as one council's example.

This page is general information about a public register and a published regulation, read on stated dates. It is not legal advice, not a certification, and not an assessment of any building or any person. No practitioner is named.

Written by Nigell Lee, Director, Reg Mon Aus Pty Ltd. Last verified 14 September 2026.