ISO Audit Group

About ISO Audit Group

Auditing tests whether the described system is the operating system. Whether that system achieves anything is a separate question, and the standards increasingly ask it.

Management system auditing tests a specific relationship: whether what the organisation says it does is what it does. The auditor reads the documented arrangements, then looks for evidence that they operated, and reports where they did not. Performed properly this is a genuine discipline requiring sampling judgement, evidence evaluation and the ability to interview people who would rather be doing something else.

It is also a check on the system's relationship to itself. An organisation can describe a process, follow it precisely, produce complete records, and be achieving nothing whatever, because the process was designed to be auditable rather than to be useful. That system is fully conformant and the audit that reports it as such has answered accurately a question nobody outside the audit actually cares about.

ISO Audit Group is about auditing management systems as a craft: scoping, sampling that could find something, evidence weight, interviewing under audit conditions, writing findings that get acted on, and corrective action that addresses a cause.

The editorial position is that conformity and effectiveness are different questions, that the incentives in certification auditing run toward the checkable one, and that the most valuable finding an auditor can make is that a well-documented process informs no decision.

This publication is independent. It is not affiliated with any certification body, accreditation body, standards organisation or consultancy, it does not accept payment for coverage, and it does not conduct or sell audits.

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