A Guide to Effective Internal Management System Audits

PREFACE

There is a lot of misunderstanding about the role of internal audits in the implementation of a management system. The range of expectations of internal audits ranges from confirming simple compliance of activities compared with documentation at one end of the scale, to that of identifying improvements at the opposite end.

Furthermore, it is commonly expressed that auditors should be somewhat god-like in their knowledge and understanding of many facets of auditing. Yet, oddly, audit programs are rarely given much top-management support in key areas:

• audit planning
• auditor selection/competency
• post-audit actions

In many cases, internal management systems audits are new to organizations. Certainly, they may have had some experience of ...