The committee has ten voting members, a chairman (who may be one of the ten, or may be another, non-voting individual) and a non-voting secretary. BBRC was assisted in its assessment of seabird records by a Seabirds Advisory Panel from 1987 to 1996. In 1999, the BBRC set up the "RIACT" (Racial Identification Amongst Changing Taxonomy) group to advise on how records of rare subspecies should be treated. RIACT published its first report in 2006, setting out the subspecies it believed were sufficiently diagnosable, and that occurred infrequently enough to justify being assessed by the rarities committee. Prior to this, a partial selection of rare subspecies had been routinely included in BBRC reports; the RIACT report aimed to bring consistency to the selection for future years. When a record is of a species not previously recorded in Britain in a wild state, BBRC deals with assessment of the bird's identification, then passes the record to the British Ornithologists' Union Records Committee, which decides whether the species should be included on the BOU's British Bird list.