Getting Tenement Management Compliance right in your company

 

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How can your company get your tenement management compliance right?

What does Tenement Management entail? Complex and time-consuming, complying with tenement management requirements demands a lot of resources. The purpose of this blog post is to provide a brief overview of tenement management, its subtasks, and some tips on how to improve tenement management compliance and efficiency within your organisation.


What is tenement management?

For those unfamiliar, a “tenement” is a mining exploration company’s land area under lease or license. These legal entities must keep careful track of their expenditures and attribute them to the appropriate activities within the tenement in order to satisfy regulatory requirements. This can be an extremely tedious process–particularly for companies with significant land holdings and many associated reporting obligations.

The primary responsibility of a tenement management position is managing the company’s tenement portfolio, which is its most important and valuable asset. Tenement management compliance involves managing critical land assets and ensuring compliance with state government legislation for all tenements under your control. Among these tasks are managing all statutory, regulatory, and commercial obligations, ensuring that these obligations are met in compliance with strict timing requirements, and dealing with any threats to tenure as necessary.

Among the responsibilities of tenement management are the following:

The negotiation of Native Title for mining leases and infrastructure licenses

The management of mining act compliance and the reporting of statutory tenements

Risk management

Strategic planning and acquisition of land

Tenement applications compilation

Maintaining tenure through strategic landholding


Why is tenement management compliance important?

Tenement management has a lot of individual, moving parts, all of which are important. Failure to successfully manage tenements within your organisation can have dire results. It will affect your whole mining operation as well as potentially leading to expensive fines. So despite its complexities, failure to comply with tenement management requirements can create even more issues.


What tenement managers are responsible for

Being a tenement manager involves working with several groups in a professional manner, such as different government departments, people who hold joint ownership of the property, landowners, lawyers, and members of organizations related to your industry.

A tenement manager is responsible for managing the following tasks:

  • Maintaining databases of our statutory commitments and obligations arising from legislation, guidance, or direction issued by any Government entity.
  • Keeping up to date with changes in legislation that impact tenement applications, management, and retention.
  • Overseeing administrative details, processes, or functions.
  • Keeping a communication log with government entities.
  • Tenement aquisition.
  • Keeping track of possible land and applying for permission to use it across different areas.
  • Submitting applications for grants and renewals, as well as any other requirements.
  • Developing exploration programs.
  • Preparation, planning, and execution of joint venture agreements.
  • Advice on how to strategically acquire tenements.
  • Advice on what needs approval and what to take into account relating to the security of tenure according to laws regulating mining, the environment, and land use.
  • Preparation and submission of necessary documents to government departments for conditions of title, including exemption from expenses or suspension of conditions.
  • The cancellation of titles, and the submission of associated documents to the Government.
  • Transfer of titles, registration of agreements, and encumbrances.
  • Assistance to file statutory reports on time.
  • Establishing mutually beneficial relationships with private, Government, and Indigenous landowners regarding access and compensation.
  • Auditing and investigating tenements to provide reliable data for commercial transactions like joint ventures, farm-in agreements, and acquisitions.
  • Assisting with planning and advice for exploratory projects up to and beyond mining.
  • Compiling contracts that define and restrict access in order to protect project interests.


How to do compliance tenement management effectively

Junior exploration companies often think that managing various aspects of their business on accounting packages and spreadsheets is more cost-effective than other options. However, this method makes it difficult to keep track of important data such as costs, timesheets, anniversary dates, meters drilled, etc.

Managing tenement compliance can be time-consuming and costly if you are using separate systems for each task. Most of these systems lack the level of detail required by businesses, which can lead to mistakes during high-reporting periods.

Producing reports accurately and efficiently is essential for any company, but it is especially important for those that manage tenements. This is because inaccurate reporting can lead to financial penalties. An integrated project and tenement solution provides the visibility and control needed to successfully launch your project. With better cost controls and access to vital metrics, you will be confident that tenement management tasks are being completed and reported on in a timely manner.


The best tool for Tenement Management

Totum Compliance is the perfect solution for consultants and in-house tenement managers. With this management software, you can easily keep track of every title and property you oversee from one centralised platform. Our solution is an all-in-one operations management tool that includes features like authority lifecycle management, exploration project status tracking, action management, Native Title management, stakeholder & contact management, work program & expenditure tracking, and land access management.

Totum Compliance is versatile and useful across all of your operations. With multi-jurisdiction adaptations, email notifications, and task assignment capabilities, you can use Totum Compliance to ensure that your operations are running smoothly and efficiently – giving you time to plan ahead for future courses of action.

Totum Compliance is an asset compliance software that automates and simplifies the processes required for regular tenement management tasks. If you have questions or want to see Totum Compliance firsthand, we would be happy to give you a demonstration and talk about how it can help benefit you and your organization.

We hope this article has given you a better understanding of tenement management and why the role is crucial within the mining industry. We hope also that you have a better understanding of the best way to manage all the complexities of such a role. 

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