What is the purpose of incident investigator's checklists?

• A. To ensure you are following your company's procedures
• B. To replace interviews
• C. To assign fault
• D. To evaluate performance of witnesses

Answer: (A)

Checklists for incident investigators act as a structured guide to make sure you follow your company’s procedures and collect all the necessary information. By laying out the exact steps, data sources, and the order of tasks, a checklist helps ensure nothing important is missed and that the investigation is consistent and well-documented across cases. It supports thorough data gathering, proper sequencing, and alignment with internal and external requirements, making the investigation reliable and auditable. Checklists are tools to improve procedural adherence, not to replace interviews, which are still needed to gather firsthand accounts. They are also not used to assign fault or to evaluate witnesses; fault analysis comes from the investigation’s root cause assessment, while witness performance isn’t the purpose of the process.