Ship vetting explained: how charterers decide which ships to use

What is ship vetting?

Ship vetting is a commercial due-diligence process. Before fixing a ship, an oil major, chemical company, trader, miner or other charterer checks whether the ship and the company managing it meet its own standards. Terminals and port authorities may screen ships too.

Vetting is different from the statutory system:

No inspection programme "approves" a ship for every charterer. OCIMF, for example, states that it does not get involved in the vetting decisions of third-party companies; each recipient of a SIRE report decides how to read it. Two charterers can reach different decisions on the same ship and the same report.

What does a vetting department look at?

A vetting review draws on several sources at once. The weight given to each depends on the charterer, the cargo and the ship type.

• Recent ship inspection reports: SIRE 2.0 for tankers and gas carriers, CDI for chemical and gas carriers carrying for CDI member companies, and RightShip inspections for dry bulk.
• The operator's management self-assessment: TMSA 3 for tanker operators, DryBMS for dry bulk.
• Port state control history: inspections, deficiencies and detentions of the ship and of the company's fleet.
• Incidents and casualties: what happened, and how well the company investigated and closed it out.
• Screening data: for dry bulk, RightShip's Safety Score and related information on its platform.
• Own experience: feedback from terminals, cargo surveyors and previous voyages.
• Office audits: some oil majors and charterers visit the management office to test the self-assessment.

Inspection findings are only half of the picture. Vetting teams also read how the operator responded: the quality of the comments, root cause analysis and corrective actions.

How does tanker vetting work?

Tanker vetting is built around OCIMF's SIRE 2.0 programme and TMSA 3, with CDI adding chemical-industry inspections.

SIRE 2.0

SIRE 2.0 is OCIMF's inspection programme for ships over 150 gross tonnes carrying oil, chemicals, gas or liquefied gas in bulk. It replaced the VIQ7 version of SIRE on 2 September 2024. An OCIMF-accredited inspector boards on behalf of a submitting company and records findings against hardware, processes and human performance, using a question set compiled for that ship.

The report goes into the SIRE database. OCIMF makes each report available for 12 months and leaves it to programme recipients to decide whether a report is acceptable for their purposes. The operator has 14 days to comment on negative observations once the report is released. Our SIRE 2.0 guide explains the PIQ, the question types and how observations are graded.

TMSA 3

TMSA is OCIMF's self-assessment for the shore management of tanker operators. OCIMF says over 90% of tanker operators, including all oil companies that operate ships, use it. Operators assess themselves against key performance indicators at four stages and publish the result to programme recipients. OCIMF recommends retaking the self-assessment every 12 months.

One of the stated aims of SIRE 2.0 is to align SIRE and TMSA. OCIMF puts it simply: TMSA mainly considers shore-based management, and SIRE 2.0 mainly considers ship-based management. Repeated observations on ships tell a vetting reviewer something about the TMSA stages the office claims. See our TMSA 3 guide.

CDI inspections

The Chemical Distribution Institute (CDI) is a non-profit foundation created by the chemical industry. Its CDI-Marine scheme inspects ships that carry bulk chemicals and liquefied gases for its member chemical companies. The ship operator registers with CDI and requests the inspection, and the report goes into the CDI database for members to use.

CDI inspections run to CDI's own Ship Inspection Report, currently the 10th edition. With the 10th edition, CDI widened its scope beyond chemical and gas carriers to include LNG carriers, product tankers and dry bulk carriers. CDI has announced a new set of chapters on alternative fuels and power sources, due to launch on 14 December 2026. A chemical tanker can therefore face both a SIRE 2.0 and a CDI inspection, with different question sets.

How does dry bulk vetting work?

Dry bulk vetting relies heavily on RightShip, alongside each charterer's own checks.

RightShip Safety Score and inspections

RightShip's Safety Score rates ships on a scale up to 5. Scores of 0 to 2 come from rules that flag specific issues to be resolved (0 means the ship is flagged as sanctioned), and scores from 3 to 5 come from a model based on five years of historical performance, using risk factors at vessel, DOC holder, class and flag level. RightShip describes the score as one input to a wider due-diligence process, not the decision itself.

RightShip inspections, run against the RightShip Inspection Ship Questionnaire (RISQ 3.2), assess an individual ship. RightShip is lowering the age at which a valid inspection is needed for vetting; from 20 January 2027 it applies to dry bulk and general cargo ships aged 10.5 years or more from delivery. Our RightShip and RISQ 3.2 guide and blog post on the 10.5-year age trigger cover the details.

DryBMS

DryBMS is the Dry Bulk Management Standard, run by the Dry Bulk Centre of Excellence (DBCE). Like TMSA 3, it measures the company's management system, here across 30 subject areas at four levels. Unlike TMSA 3, results stay confidential unless the subscriber chooses to share them with charterers. See our DryBMS guide.

How does tanker vetting differ from dry bulk vetting?

The common thread is evidence. Both systems now expect crews to show what procedures require, and both look through the ship to the office that manages it.

Where does port state control fit into vetting?

Port state control results are public and widely used in screening. A detention or a cluster of deficiencies can delay acceptance or prompt questions from a charterer, even when the ship's last vetting inspection was clean.

PSC regimes also look at the company, not only the ship. In the Paris MoU, for example, the ship risk profile includes a company performance factor calculated from the detention and deficiency history of every ship the ISM company manages, so one ship's poor inspection can affect the profile of its sister ships. Our port state control inspection guide explains how to prepare.

How can operators improve vetting performance?

Vetting performance improves when the ship, the crew and the office tell the same story, backed by records. In practice:

1. Treat every declaration as evidence. The SIRE 2.0 PIQ, RightShip platform data and certificates must match what the inspector finds.
2. Run pre-vetting inspections against the current SIRE 2.0 or RISQ 3.2 questions, with crew demonstrations and interviews, not just a document check.
3. Prepare the crew to explain, not recite. Both programmes test whether people can carry out the task the procedure describes.
4. Answer findings properly. Base every comment or root cause analysis on a real investigation, with corrective and preventive actions that are then closed.
5. Trend findings across the fleet. The same observation on three ships points to an office cause: procedure, training or maintenance planning.
6. Keep the self-assessment honest. A TMSA 3 stage or DryBMS level that the evidence does not support undermines everything else.
7. Manage PSC history actively. Close deficiencies with evidence and look for patterns across the fleet.
8. Plan inspections around the ship's schedule, especially dry docks and the RightShip age trigger dates.

We explore where these gaps usually appear in SIRE 2.0 execution gaps: technical insights every fleet manager must address.

Where do pre-vetting inspections and office reviews help?

They close the two halves of the vetting picture. A pre-vetting inspection or sailing audit tests the ship and crew against the questions a vetting inspector will ask, while there is still time to fix what it finds. A gap assessment of TMSA 3 or DryBMS tests whether the office can prove the stage or level it claims.

Synergetic has carried out more than 550 onboard sailing audits and pre-vetting inspections, 28 SIRE 2.0 and RightShip gap analyses with onboard training, and 16 TMSA 3 and DryBMS office preparations.

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