ABSTRACT
Sir Francis Bacon has some useful advice for SHE auditors. If auditors begin with preconceptions and biases, the audit will be worthless, but if they progress from a position of healthy skepticism, then their conclusions will be robust. The key method that effective auditors use to move their doubts to certainties is through the process of verification. As we have seen previously, much of the auditor’s initial information arises from the spoken word at formal or informal discussions. Verification is the confirmation of this initial information by other supporting information that may be other verbal comments, the auditor’s own observations, or most often from some form of written or documentary information. This process of verification or “drill down,” as it is often known, is a fundamental part of obtaining reliable audit conclusions and is the place where many inexperienced auditors flounder. The situation is relatively easy in a Level 1 compliance audit, which may be looking at compliance with a single procedure or instruction. In these circumstances the auditor needs a thorough understanding of the procedure and the limited associated paperwork. The verification still needs to be done on a sampling basis but sampling done intelligently by the auditor can ensure that he or she is not just directed toward a good outcome. For example, if the Level 1 audit is assessing exhaust ventilation arrangements to ensure that workers are not exposed to harmful fumes, the auditor might take note of one or two particular exhaust systems during the site visit and then, instead of viewing all the test data for every extract unit at the facility, specifically ask to be shown the latest test data for the one or two extracts that he or she picked at random. Alternatively, the auditor might initially ask to see any “black list” of overdue tests on extract systems and then explore why those items are overdue. It is this type of prior thought about how the audit process may be streamlined that makes it both efficient and effective.
