What are the Opportunities of Remote Auditing?

People and Remote Auditing

We always support auditor training to take time to put people at easily break the ice and explaining the objective. Underline that auditors are here to conduct the effective audit of system processes, be believe audit process as fact-finding exercise, not a fault-finding exercise. Its best practice to explain to the audited how audit findings are dealt with.

It’s not the end of the world to get a non-conformance but we convince the audited that this is an opportunity for improvement. It may be difficult to get a measure of when the audited is uneasy but the auditor needs to understand that comfortable audited helps auditor to attain the objective of the audit.

That’s where a skilled auditor will excel, if they start to get a smidgen of a gut feel that this person’s not that comfortable, they can take some preventive steps to just try and strengthen what we’re doing and make the auditors more comfortable.

You need to set aside extra time for planning and preparing some strategies that will help put people at ease. Remote auditing is not as convenient as an onsite audit is and you need to review your performance monitored on regular basis.

Equipment and Remote Auditing:

If audited is not equipped with the requirement, an audit may be interrupted and may attract cancellation of the meeting, therefore keep your client informed and check that maximum information are available for the audit, audit time may be reduced and the specific question may be prepared to be asked during the audit.

Further check that basic things are available with the audited like:

• Laptop, meeting software, audit schedule and availability of the audited representative during the audit, need of virtual site visit

• Cameras

• Audio

• Share portal like Google drive, one drive, or any other storage or even on mail.

• Agreement of the schedule and use of remote audit.

In our normal audits, we really encourage if you want to emphasize the significance of planning and preparedness, you need to get an understanding of the benchmarks or the requirements you’re auditing. Even before the audit, it’s really figured out what type of evidence might be available to demonstrate conformance to that criteria.

If it’s a stored procedure, what kind of evidence might the audited have for a specific requirement, such as on risk and opportunities?

The next point is making sure we have that information security, and access rights. Software options are quite good in that you can create and access profiles for your auditor and limit what they need to see.

I have given the example of chemical storage and handling. That’s the Safe Work procedure we need to audit. We want to move on from just seeing records and documentary evidence, we probably need to go and use some of those chemical storage areas and see how things are actually stored. What is the outcome? Are they stored properly is anything leaking?

Audit Process

I’ll step you through a remote audit process, but just some of our standard auditing approaches… If anything, we need to be a little bit more formal. You can be relatively informal on a site audit when you already know everyone. You’ve already met the team you work with, but in a remote audit, you probably need to go the other way and be a little bit more formal about things like formal communication opportunities, opening and closing meetings, clear timeframes, and breaks.

Virtual Site Tour

Personally, I tend to ask for a bit of a site tour. If I am on-site doing an audit fairly early on in the process, they’re very valuable. You can see some of what’s happening well or not so well, and what plant and equipment are being used and who’s on-site, things like that. It’s still good practice in a remote audit but work out through what means you’re going to do that.

Communication for Virtual Audit

If we’re working as part of an audit team, we need to communicate and update each other more regularly than a normal order in a remote audit. When I do site audits, I tend to debrief audited and let them know how everything’s going.

With our key contact person on site, if we have that arrangement where we say, if there are any actionable findings, we’ll raise them with the society manager in the first instance. And then communicate it to them. I think those formal communication channels with key contact and more important in a remote audit.

Reflective/Clarifying Questions in Virtual Audit

Different styles of questions can be used when we’re interviewing people, to both put the auditor at ease but also to uncover the information and evidence that we need to say one or two of those question types were reflective and clarifying questions.

The purpose of a reflective or clarifying question is to start our next question with a statement that reconfirms what we’ve heard in the auditor’s response to the previous question. Auditors really like these questions, because if X is interviewing me now, it signals to me that Oh, yes, X understands what I’ve just told him. It’s a way of building confidence within the audited that you are treating their information appropriately, and you understand it.

So if X just gave me a response around something really critical, that’s a good time to ask a reflective or clarifying question to say, “Well X, let me see if I understand when you inspect the incoming goods, you check x and y and z, and then it needs to be signed off by the warehouse manager?” And then I go into my new question.

It also gives the audited a chance to say “Well hang on Mr. B, no, we don’t always check x, y, and z some days, we need to apply a different checklist instead”. So it shows them you’re listening, it shows them your understanding of the critical points, and it allows them to confirm that you understand things correctly.

So the big tip is that I would probably ask a few more of those than in a normal audit. Take the extra time to confirm and communicate findings, any action required, particularly if there are any nonconformance findings. There’s always a risk in a normal audit that we go back, and the audited say I didn’t realize we had to take action on that. Obviously, there is an increased chance of that during a remote audit.

Take Extra time to confirm Findings and Action (Particularly findings)

When you’re writing your report, be clearer about what the evidence was, who you were interviewing, what the document or record was that demonstrated non-conformance. In a remote audit, I think there’s an argument to say it’s important to be a little bit clearer because that audit report becomes your key record of the audit immediately and into the future as well.

So if X got to conduct the same audit in 12 months, and there’s nothing recorded about how I determined conformance or non-conformance is it’s going to be more critical.

Failure of remote tools

Another really important point that I have seen some misunderstanding around is where I will say that it’s a non-conformance because the auditors couldn’t demonstrate that they’ve got a safety data sheet. If the underlying reason is because of their remote already tools, that really shouldn’t be an answer.

You’ve got two choices:

State that you couldn’t determine conformance or non-conformance with this requirement for this reason

Ask them to send you additional evidence once the remote audit has taken place. We can’t really blame a failure of the remote auditing tools as a reason for why they couldn’t demonstrate conformance, because perhaps they could have if those tools were working properly.