The Lao TLAS has been designed to “ensure that timber and wood products from Laos to EU, other export markets including domestic market have been implemented according to national legislation”.  It consists five elements as:

• Timber legality definitions (TLDs) define the timber legality of six sources such as from production forest, conversion areas, plantation, village use forest, confiscation and importation and two cross-cutting timber legality definitions in relation to labor obligations, and wood processing and trade operations.
• Timber Supply chain control is to ensure the legality of timber sources to avoid mixing illegal timber with legal timber. This can be done through operational control by the operator and verification by the authority. Main stages of 7 timber supply chains have been defined for legal timber from production forest, conversion areas, plantation, village use forest, confiscation, importation, and mill operation.
• Verification of compliance provides detailed procedures for related line sectors to verify the compliance of TLDs and defines main stages of supply chain control for operational control by the operator for data entry and verification of compliance by the authority for data validation and reconciliation between stages.
• FLEGT Licensing defines procedures for issuing the FLEGT license and Lao authority to be issued FLEGT license.
• Independent monitoring Laos will consult with EU on setting up of the independent monitoring organization to monitor the effectiveness of operation of the Lao TLAS.

The detailed elements of Lao TLAS is described separately in VPA Annex II