Port State Control (PSC) is statutory: government officers verify a ship meets the international conventions, and the worst outcome is detention. SIRE is commercial: an OCIMF-accredited inspector reports on a tanker for the oil majors and charterers who decide whether to use her. A ship can clear one and still fall at the other.
What is the difference between SIRE and PSC?
PSC answers a legal question: does this foreign ship meet SOLAS, MARPOL, STCW, MLC and the rest, or should it be stopped from sailing until it does? SIRE answers a commercial one: is this tanker one we are comfortable putting our cargo, our charter money and our name on? The first is asked by governments and applies to every ship in port. The second is asked by cargo owners and applies because tanker charterers will not fix a vessel they have not vetted.
The two look similar from the deck, an inspector walking the ship with a question set, but everything around the boarding differs:
| PSC | SIRE 2.0 | |
|---|---|---|
| Run by | Port state authorities under regional MoUs (Paris, Tokyo and others) | OCIMF programme; inspections commissioned by member companies |
| Legal basis | International conventions given force by national law | None; contractual and commercial |
| Applies to | All foreign ships in port | Tankers and gas carriers in the SIRE programme |
| Trigger | Ship Risk Profile, inspection windows, overriding factors | Charterer need; OCIMF sets no interval, in practice roughly every 6 months |
| Question set | Officer samples from the conventions' full scope | CVIQ compiled per vessel from the SIRE 2.0 question library |
| Output | Deficiencies with action codes; detention if the ship is unsafe | Observations in a structured report; no score, no pass/fail grade |
| Where the record lives | Public regional databases such as THETIS | OCIMF database, visible to member companies |
| Worst realistic outcome | Detention, escalating risk profile, regional ban | Charterers decline the ship; fixtures and pool earnings suffer |
| Operator's formal response | Rectification and close-out; appeals are limited and non-binding | 14-day operator comment window before publication |
Who conducts each inspection and why?
A PSC boarding is carried out by a Port State Control Officer employed by the port's maritime authority, targeting ships through the risk-based system described in the Paris MoU Ship Risk Profile explained. The officer's mandate is public safety and pollution prevention, and the process the crew experiences follows the steps in how a PSC inspection actually runs.
A SIRE inspection is performed by an OCIMF-accredited inspector, commissioned through the SIRE programme, most often by an oil major's vetting department ahead of chartering decisions. Since 2 September 2024 every SIRE inspection is a SIRE 2.0 inspection: OCIMF withdrew the old VIQ7 questionnaire on that date. The inspector works on a tablet through a Compiled Vessel Inspection Questionnaire (CVIQ), assembled for that specific vessel from the question library, and answers each question across hardware, process and the human element, with photographs. The report then goes through validation, the operator's 14-day comment window, and publication to the database OCIMF members read.
The motive shapes the inspection. A PSCO must establish clear grounds before digging deeper and works toward a defined legal threshold. A SIRE inspector is paid to be thorough on every compiled question, and the report's readers are free to weigh any observation as heavily as they like.
Can a ship pass PSC and still fail vetting?
Yes, routinely, and the reason is structural: statutory compliance is the floor, and vetting is a commercial judgement made above it. PSC confirms the ship is not unsafe enough to stop. It does not certify that maintenance is proactive, that procedures are genuinely embedded, or that the crew's competence would satisfy a major's vetting department. Strictly, a ship does not "fail" SIRE at all; the report simply records observations, and each charterer applies its own thresholds when screening. The outcome that matters, the fixture, is decided in an office the operator never sees.
Concrete example: a rescue boat engine that starts is unremarkable to a PSCO. Under the CVIQ, the inspector may ask the assigned officer to demonstrate the launching procedure; hesitation becomes a human-element observation. Nothing about the boat breaches a convention. The observation still sits in the report every prospective charterer reads for the next year, quietly narrowing the ship's market. The reverse almost never holds: a ship in vetting-ready condition walks through most PSC boardings, which is why serious tanker operators treat the two as one standard with two audiences. How the CVIQ's three-legged questions work, and how to prepare a crew for them, is covered in SIRE 2.0 and the CVIQ.
How do the two records interact commercially?
They converge on the vetting desk. A charterer's screening pulls the SIRE report, and it also pulls PSC history, which is public in THETIS and the other regional databases. A detention therefore follows the ship into every subsequent vetting screen, prompts questions about the management behind it, and for pooled tankers feeds the pool-point calculations that set the vessel's share of earnings. The full statutory fallout, off-hire, risk-profile escalation, potential banning, is laid out in detention costs and consequences; the commercial echo through vetting usually lasts longer.
The interaction runs the other way too. A pattern of PSC deficiencies in an area like fire safety tells a vetting department where to look, and inspectors read the same public record before boarding. Neither record can be edited after the fact: PSC entries are permanent, and a published SIRE report is what it is. The one formal lever the operator holds is the 14-day comment window on a SIRE report, where evidence-backed comments, dated photos of an item's actual condition, the maintenance history, the corrective action already taken, shape how charterers read an observation. That lever only works if the evidence exists before the inspection did. Where the other oversight regimes, class and flag among them, sit around these two is mapped in vetting vs class vs flag vs PSC.
Which one should a tanker operator prepare for first?
Prepare for SIRE, and PSC readiness comes with it; the reverse is not true. SIRE 2.0 sets the higher bar: a vessel-specific question set, photographic evidence, and a crew expected to demonstrate procedures rather than produce paperwork. A tanker held to that standard, with the walk-through documented, rarely gives a PSCO clear grounds to expand an inspection. A tanker prepared only to the PSC floor gives a SIRE inspector observations by the page.
Sequence matters less than cadence. OCIMF sets no inspection interval and a report stays active on the SIRE database for 12 months; what drives the rhythm is charterers wanting a current report, which in practice puts a SIRE inspection on a trading tanker roughly every six months, alongside the PSC windows of whichever regions she trades, so preparation cannot be a scramble before each event. The operators who handle both well run one continuous loop, crew walk-throughs against the applicable question set, photo evidence per item, office visibility of what is open, and let each boarding find the ship already inspected. The hub for the vetting side of that loop is the SIRE 2.0 cluster. The honest limit is worth restating: no preparation can remove an observation or a deficiency once it is recorded. What preparation does is keep them off the record in the first place.