A Concentrated Inspection Campaign is an annual, themed add-on to routine Port State Control inspections. For three months, normally 1 September to 30 November, every PSC inspection in the participating regions also works through a standard questionnaire on one focus area, such as fire safety, ballast water management or cargo securing. The results are published after the campaign, and a CIC finding is a normal PSC deficiency: it goes on the ship's record and can be detainable.
The Paris and Tokyo MoUs usually run the campaign jointly, so the same questionnaire is applied across Europe, the North Atlantic and the Asia-Pacific in the same quarter, and several smaller regional MoUs adopt it too.
How it shows up in practice
A CIC removes the sampling uncertainty that normally shapes an inspection. In a routine boarding, the officer decides where to look based on clear grounds; during a campaign window, the year's topic is examined on every inspected ship regardless. In 2026 the theme is cargo securing: officers will ask for the approved Cargo Securing Manual, look at the condition of lashings and securing points, and check whether the crew actually works to the manual rather than around it. The questionnaire itself is published shortly before the window opens, which gives a prepared operator weeks to run the same questions internally first. The 2026 campaign, question by question, is covered in our guide to Concentrated Inspection Campaigns, and it helps to understand where the CIC slots into a normal inspection.
What it means for operators
A CIC is the rare part of PSC that is announced in advance. The topic is known months ahead, the questionnaire days to weeks ahead, and the inspection pressure is concentrated in a fixed window, so fleets that rehearse the questionnaire on board before September face the campaign with the gaps already closed. The findings still count fully: campaign deficiencies feed the ship's record and the risk profile like any other, and past campaigns have produced detentions. Running the published questionnaire as a fleet-wide pre-inspection, with evidence collected against each question, is exactly the pattern Fleetward's PSC workflow supports.