PetroStreet

How critical is it to perform baseline inspections for all equipment at site?
Does it have to be enforced, and how? What are the right references to check & verify?

Baseline inspections are absolutely critical, and yes, they should be enforced as a formal requirement, not treated as good practice only.
Without a baseline, you’re basically blind when you try to judge whether equipment is degrading or just always looked like that.

See the basic concept of any inspection job is to start with inspection history.
No inspector goes to the site to perform any meaningful inspection before looking into the inspection history of the equipment.
Absence of any baseline inspection when the equipment was installed would provide a gap when Inspector would go and perform first inspection after the equipment is placed in service.
API 570 needs initial /as-installed thickness inspection to perform adequate trending once follow-up thickness inspection is performed.
API 510 asks for inspection history & condition assessment.
Look at RBI data basis, it asks for baseline inspection as well (API 580).
Damage rate calculations need initial condition (API 581).

This itself is quite a job to manage.
Even if baseline inspections are made, the next step is not only to handle the data but making sure that the data is entered to the system which will be eventually used to inspect & manage the assets. Many a time, during construction of new plant, those systems are not yet ready. Contractors provide bulky data after performing the baseline inspection, and there is no where to link that. And once system gets available, tabulating /entering the data itself becomes a task to manage.
Look into this while you make sure the baseline inspections are performed.