ABSTRACT
Taking care of business and also doing this in a safe way is often challenging for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). In order to carry out the latter, the enterprise needs to ponder safety, develop a vision and, ultimately, express this vision in a safety policy. In order to understand the roles of international standards and codes in the context of safety and safety performance at SMEs one needs to understand the actual role and status of standards. If there are no requirements in terms of standards or codes in any official documents issued by local authorities and there are no contracts in place requiring a certain standard or code to be used during the collaboration, officially there are no mandatory standards that a specific SME needs to comply with. An audit is a systematic, independent and documented process for obtaining 'audit evidence' and evaluating it objectively to determine the extent to which 'audit criteria' are fulfilled.
