ANAB wants to audit our auditor auditing us...

I never judge my CB auditor as useless. They are being controlled by the ANAB. Another auditor could be just as bad. If I really want one, I could request a specific name Auditor who may not be working for my CB. I do my best to show case our business management system to any 3rd party auditor. Thank you.

 

When I was a member of the Registration Management Committee under the AAQG, we had a situation where a couple (actually married) of AS auditors had been witnessed 5 times in the same year for 5 different CB's. Talk about professional witnessed auditors....I am sure they were commanding premium dollars from the small CB's they assisted with AS accreditation.

It is time for unannounced witnessed audits, both by CB's and AB's. Also, the Market Surveillance Visits must be enhanced, in order to augment confidence in the process. A well executed Market Surveillance Visit would be much more valuable than witnessed audits, in my estimation.

 

My company just went through a witness audit process last month. It was strongly recommended by our CB that we allow the audit to be witnessed. In our case our normal auditor was the person doing the witness audit. The new auditor, as some of the other posts in this thread described was indeed very careful and "by the book" during the audit. We received 4 minors during the audit. My take is that 1 of the minors could have really been just an observation and 2 other ones were justified. The remaining minor was troubling because the auditor wanted to write it as a major immediately without any explanation or discussion from myself and my team. The Witness auditor actually had to talk the auditor down from the major to a minor NC for the same reasons that I was attempting to explain. So in my case this was good that the witness auditor was familiar with our operation and processes. I understand the need for the witness audit but it is really stressful for everyone concerned, especially for the company paying for it.

 

Please forgive me if I interject as an impartial observer with history. In the days both when I was auditing and when running the operational or accreditation side of a CB I and we had many audits. As has been mentioned the quality of the audit depends on the competence of the AB auditor. In much the same way as the quality of a CB audit depends on ...

I always looked forward to the process and tried not to change my approach. After all 'Quality means doing it right when no one else is watching.' The issue of soft grading is relatively new and reflects pressures from both sides (client and CB) to offer a 'friendly' service. The whole issue IMHO creates confusion and the sooner we can get auditors to: raise findings based on fact rather than opinion; clients to treat findings as valuable feedback (whatever their grading); auditors (again) to provide accurate grading of findings based on evidence, the better the whole process will work and the more confidence customers will have in certificates.

As a customer when I see watered down findings on an audit report for one of my suppliers the supplier and the CB both slip down in my estimation.

 

Congratulations for a successful audit!