TASCC audit: what to expect and how to prepare

If you haul grain or feed for a mill, co-op or merchant, TASCC certification is a condition of the work, and the audit is how you keep it. Here's what the auditor is checking, what catches hauliers out, and how to walk in with the records already in order.

Not certified yet? Start with how to get TASCC certified.

What TASCC is, in one paragraph

The Trade Assurance Scheme for Combinable Crops is owned by the Agricultural Industries Confederation (AIC). It covers the whole chain — merchants, stores, laboratories and hauliers — and the Haulage Code of Practice is the part that applies to you. Certification is carried out by Kiwa Agri Food. The point of the haulage code is simple: prove that nothing carried on the trailer before could contaminate the crop or feed on it now.

What the auditor checks

A TASCC haulage audit is a records audit first. The auditor will pick trailers and loads and follow the paper trail for each. Expect to be asked for:

Previous-load declarations

Before each collection, a declaration of what the trailer last carried, and confirmation it's compatible with the load going on. The auditor will pick a load and ask to see the declaration that preceded it.

A documented cleaning method, and the records to match

A written method for each body type you run — tipper, bulker, walking floor — and dated cleaning records signed by whoever did the work. "We always wash between loads" isn't evidence. A record for the specific trailer, on the specific date, is.

The Exclusion List and the Sensitive List

The AIC publishes a list of materials that must never be carried on a TASCC vehicle, and a list of materials that can be carried but need the AIC cleaning protocol before the trailer goes back to crop or feed. The auditor will want to see that you know which is which, and that your trailer histories show what was carried and what cleaning followed.

Pre-load inspection

That the trailer was checked and confirmed fit before loading — clean, dry, free of residue, smell and pests. Recorded, not remembered.

Traceability: load, vehicle, driver

Delivery paperwork that ties each load to the vehicle that carried it and the driver who drove it. If the auditor can't get from a delivery note to a trailer to a cleaning record, that's a gap.

Driver awareness

Evidence that drivers understand contamination risk and the cleaning rules — briefing records, training sign-offs, the driver's own signatures on the records above.

What catches hauliers out

The AIC publishes its audit data: 524 non-conformances across 600 TASCC audits in the second quarter of 2026, categorised into major and minor. The scheme doesn't publish what they were about, but the ones we see catching hauliers out are rarely dirty trailers. They're record-keeping:

• A cleaning that was done but never signed or dated.
• A previous load that the driver knew but nobody wrote down.
• A trailer history with a gap the auditor can't fill.
• A cleaning method that exists in someone's head but not on paper.
• Records kept per driver or per month rather than per trailer, so the trailer's story can't be read in one place.
• The folder that's in the cab, or the other yard, on the day.

How to prepare

Four weeks out: pick three trailers and pull their records for the last six months. Read them as the auditor would. Every gap you find now is one the auditor doesn't.

Two weeks out: check the cleaning method document exists for every body type you run and that drivers have signed to say they've read it. Check the Exclusion and Sensitive lists you're working from are the current AIC versions.

The week before: confirm every driver has their previous-load declarations and cleaning records up to date. Chase the missing signatures now.

On the day: have the records reachable from one place. If they're on paper, one folder per trailer. If they're in a system, the trailer's history on screen.

Do you need a TASCC consultant?

Not for the audit itself. A consultant is worth it for registration, writing your documented cleaning method, and the first audit if you've never been through one. That holds for hauliers in Ireland and the UK alike.

After that, the audit is about records: previous-load declarations, cleaning, pre-load inspections, and traceability from load to vehicle to driver. Every trailer, every load, for the full audit year. No consultant can produce those after the fact. They have to be kept as the work happens.

That's the part Overhaul does. The driver records it at the trailer, and the audit becomes an export.

Doing it without the folder

Everything above can be done on paper, and plenty of hauliers do. The cost is time: the day before the audit, the weekend of reconciling, the driver who kept his own book. The alternative is to capture the record at the trailer, on the driver's phone, as the load happens — previous loads visible before loading, the cleaning recorded with a photo, the inspection signed — and export any trailer over any date range when the auditor asks. That is what TASCC records software is for.