Charterer vetting is the risk screening a charterer runs on a vessel before fixing it. It pulls the ship's inspection reports, its Port State Control and incident history, and the operator's management record into a single accept-or-reject decision, made fresh for each voyage. No score is published, and there is no appeal.
What is charterer vetting and why do oil majors require it?
Vetting exists because the charterer bears risk in a ship it does not control. An oil major fixing a tanker puts its cargo, its name and its pollution liability aboard a vessel someone else crews and maintains. Class, flag and PSC only establish that the ship may legally trade, a floor the charterer considers necessary but nowhere near sufficient; how those regimes divide the work is mapped in vetting vs class vs flag vs PSC. Vetting is the layer the charterer adds on top: its own judgement, against its own criteria, about whether this ship, this operator and this crew are an acceptable risk for this cargo.
Because the criteria are the charterer's own, they are mostly unpublished, and they differ from company to company. The same vessel can be acceptable to one major and declined by another in the same week. That opacity is not an oversight; it is the nature of a private commercial decision.
How does the vetting process work, step by step?
The process runs from standing data to a live decision in four broad steps.
First, the paperwork that exists before any fixture. The operator maintains the vessel's particulars in the Harmonised Vessel Particulars Questionnaire (HVPQ), keeps crew and management data current, and publishes its shore-side self-assessment, the TMSA, through OCIMF's system; how TMSA works covers that submission in depth.
Second, the inspection record. Tankers carry a recent SIRE report, chemical and gas carriers a CDI report, dry bulk vessels a RightShip inspection where age requires one. When the current report is too old for the next fixture, the operator or a charterer commissions a fresh inspection.
Third, screening at nomination. When a vessel is put forward for a cargo, the charterer's vetting team reads the inspection report alongside the vessel's PSC history, incident record, terminal feedback and the operator's management picture. OCIMF notes that many report recipients run automated screening over parts of this; a human vetting superintendent handles the judgement calls.
Fourth, the decision: the vessel is cleared for the fixture, declined, or held pending clarification. Then the next nomination starts the cycle again.
What is SIRE and how does it fit in?
SIRE is OCIMF's Ship Inspection Report Programme, the tanker industry's shared inspection regime since 1993, and the single most-read input in tanker vetting. Its current generation, SIRE 2.0, went fully live on 2 September 2024. Each inspection runs from a Compiled Vessel Inspection Questionnaire (CVIQ), assembled uniquely for that vessel from OCIMF's question library: core questions on every inspection, rotational questions occasionally, campaign questions industry-wide for a period. The inspector records responses on a tablet through hardware, process and human response tools, with photographs supporting negative observations.
Two features matter most for vetting. SIRE produces no grade or score; OCIMF bars inspectors from even hinting at acceptability, so the report is a body of observations each charterer weighs its own way. And the operator gets a voice: 14 days to add comments to negative observations from the day the report is released, before it publishes to recipients. Reports remain downloadable for 12 months. Preparing for the vessel-specific questionnaire is its own subject, covered in SIRE 2.0 and the CVIQ.
How does RightShip fit for dry bulk?
RightShip plays the equivalent screening role for dry cargo, with one visible difference: it publishes a Safety Score from 1 to 5, built from the vessel's five-year history of incidents, PSC performance, detentions, and the performance of its manager, flag and class. A score of 5 indicates best-practice attention to safety; scores of 1 or 2 mean one of RightShip's safety rules has been triggered, each with its own resolution path and extra scrutiny in vetting.
Inspections are tied to age. A dry bulk vessel of 11 years or more currently needs a valid RightShip inspection, conducted against the RISQ questionnaire (version 3.2), and the threshold drops to 10 years from 1 January 2027. A vessel that misses the requirement has its Safety Score downgraded to 2 and cannot pass a vetting nomination. The score itself is explained in the RightShip Safety Score. The vet, as with the majors, is per fixture: RightShip's methodology states a recommendation is valid only for the nominated vessel and voyage under consideration.
What happens during an onboard vetting inspection?
A SIRE 2.0 inspection runs to roughly eight hours on board. It opens with a meeting between inspector and senior officers, then works through the compiled questionnaire area by area: certificates and records against the process questions, the ship's actual condition against the hardware questions, and the crew against the human questions, which means officers demonstrating equipment and procedures in their own areas of responsibility, not pointing at the manual.
The closing meeting is where findings surface, and it is the operator's first and best chance to engage them. An observation discussed on board, with the vessel's own dated evidence at hand, is handled from a far stronger position than one first seen in the published report. Chemical-sector inspections run differently in an important way: the CDI questionnaire is fixed rather than compiled, so the crew can prepare every question in advance, as covered in how CDI inspections work.
What are the possible outcomes?
Not pass or fail. Skuld's guidance to tanker crews says it plainly: "you do not pass or fail a vetting inspection"; the results give the charterer the information it needs to decide whether the vessel is accepted for use. The inspection produces a report with observations. The vetting decision then lands in one of three places: the vessel is acceptable for the fixture, it is declined, or the charterer asks for more, clarification, evidence of corrective action, sometimes a fresh inspection.
The report outlives the single decision. Every future screening by every recipient reads the same observations, which is why the 14-day operator comment window matters: it is the one place the operator speaks to all future readers at once. And for pooled tankers the outcome reaches directly into revenue, since pool agreements tie earning points to vetting status, as pool points explained sets out.
How long is a vetting approval valid?
Strictly, there is no such thing as a standing approval. Steamship Mutual's guidance on oil major approvals is blunt: letters relied on as approvals generally state that no approval has been granted, and express approvals "are given only for specific voyages, not for a period of time". What exists instead is current acceptability, resting on evidence with a shelf life. OCIMF keeps SIRE reports downloadable for 12 months, but commercial practice runs tighter: documented charterparty and pool clauses require a SIRE report not more than six months old, and one published VLCC pool agreement deducts pool points the moment that recency lapses.
So the honest answer is: an approval is valid until the next nomination tests it. The operators who handle this well treat vetting readiness as a continuous state rather than an event, an approach set out in how to prepare for charterer vetting.
Who carries the vetting risk: owner, manager or charterer?
Contractually, mostly the owner. Where a charterparty contains an express approval or eligibility clause, failing vetting is the owner's breach: in one published London arbitration, a tanker that lost its oil major acceptability was held off-hire and its owners liable in damages for the charterer's losses. The flip side, from the same P&I case law: absent express wording, no approval obligation is implied, which is why owners are warned never to warrant "approval" itself, only what they control, such as maintaining a current inspection report and eligibility for screening.
The manager carries the risk operationally. Vetting reads the DOC holder's whole record, so one vessel's detention shadows its sisters, and a manager's TMSA claims are tested against every inspection in the fleet. The charterer, for its part, risks only a lost nomination. That asymmetry is the quiet engine of the whole regime: the party that decides bears the least cost when the answer is no, which is why the burden of being ready, every fixture, every time, sits with the ship.