Legal basis

“The Taiwan Transportation Safety Board (TTSB) shall establish a transportation voluntary safety reporting system; the system is not established to punish any individual or organization, or to hold them accountable for any incidents, and the TTSB shall keep the reporter’s identity and data source confidentially “, which is stipulated by the Paragraph 5, Article 5 of the Transportation Occurrence Investigation Act.

What is the Taiwan transportation voluntary Safety Reporting System?

To effectively identify hazards that may undermine transportation safety and to compensate for the limitations in the mandatory reporting systems and the voluntary reporting systems established by relevant companies, the TTSB refers to the practices of advanced countries worldwide to establish a voluntary reporting system for transportation safety.

The TSRS is operated in accordance with the principles of voluntariness, confidentiality, and non-punitive. It offers a platform for any person in the transportation industry to share his/her work experiences involved with transportation safety, or to report an unsafe situation that he/she has identified. After a report is handled and studied by the TSRS, safety enhancing measures may be raised to relevant organizations for references to prevent hazards from developing into causes of major occurrences.

System scope

The TSRS has four subsystems. The TAiwan Confidential Aviation safety REporting system (TACARE) that has been operating since 2000. The railway voluntary safety reporting system is scheduled to be introduced on August 1, 2019.

The operations are planned as follows:

1. TAiwan Confidential Aviation safety REporting system-TACARE (operating).
2. Railway voluntary safety reporting system (under construction).
3. Marine voluntary safety reporting system (planning).
4. Highway voluntary safety reporting system (planning).

System users

Personnel in the transportation industry and passengers can all file voluntary reports. If, after review, the report content is confirmed to be related to topics within the processing scope of this system, then the reporter will be given a thank you gift.

The TSRS also accepts voluntary reports from transportation enterprises or supervisory authorities.

Types of reports to be or not to be processed by this system

The TSRS encourages all personnel in the transportation industry to share the unintentional transportation-safety–related errors that have been committed in the work process. To err is human. Sharing experiences of error is vital for enhancing transportation safety.

Any observations, experiences, or hazards that do not fall into any of the following categories can be reported to this system.

• Involving major transportation occurrences;
• Involving criminal acts or malicious behaviors;
• Non-safety–related disputes regarding procurement, human resource management, employer–employee relationships, or customer complaints;
• Situations or incidents that pose serious and urgent threats to transportation safety, personnel safety, or health;
• Reports without specific content, duplicate reports of a hazard, or reports concerning topics that have been properly processed and clearly answered but for which the reporter continues to file reports or responds with malicious comments or attacks.

Report processing procedure

After receiving a report, the TSRS will contact the reporter and competent authorities (institutions) when necessary to clarify the content of the report. The report will be forwarded to competent authorities (institutions) for the development of remedial safety measures. The system will maintain confidentiality throughout the process of managing the report; any identifiable information concerning the reporter will not be disclosed.

The information contained in the reports will not be used for purposes other than the enhancement of transportation safety to ensure that safety information will continue to be received. Reports sharing will have all identifiable information removed and would be done via internet, in printed form, or through other channels as appropriate.

For reports that should not be processed by the TSRS, the working group may forward them to competent authorities (institutions) if deemed necessary.

Confidentiality mechanism of the system

Article 30 of the Transportation Occurrence Investigation Act specifies that “a person who discloses publicly any information related to the identity of the reporter or the data source shall be subject to an administrative fine from NTD 60,000 to NTD 300,000.”

Reports in the TSRS are processed by designated staff members in independent offices with access control. All participating staff members have signed a nondisclosure agreement and have guaranteed that they will not leak the identities of reporters.

After the staff members have confirmed the correctness of the report content or if the reporter has expressed the desire to not to be contacted, all identifiable information will be eliminated to ensure that no one can access identifiable information of the reporter from the reports.

Channel of report

TAiwan Confidential Aviation safety REporting system (TACARE)

Toll free number: 0800-075-085

Fax: (02) 8912-7395

Email: tacare@ttsb.gov.tw

Online reporting: www.tacare.org.tw

Reporting form of the TACARE report: a prepaid return envelope is attached to the final page of the newsletters