I have heard many tales of audits going wrong, but all seem to only be from the perspective of the auditor, which can make auditees feel more intimidated. I would like to address the balance and tell some of my stories as an auditee for the last 22 years. I hope these help other auditees realise that mistakes can be made on both sides of this fence.

I won’t be naming anyone involved in these tales to avoid anyone’s blushes; however, I will probably be mentioning the type of audit as most times this is relevant to the reason these incidents made me small, or even sometimes cringe inside.

The first story comes from my very first customer audit and still makes me shake my head today. The customer wanted to ensure that our products were developed in such a way as to give them confidence in the robustness and accuracy of results. As we were going through our documentation pack one of the Lead Auditor suddenly said how can we trust anything if your templates are wrong. Thinking that we may have missed something vital such as a date or pagination I looked down at my pack but could see nothing amiss.

Then as I was told the date is in the wrong place, the reference number is in the wrong format, the style does not conform to standard I began to wonder if I was missing something. Then as they continued, I realised they were describing their own in-house templates. I calmly pointed out that our company templates had all the relevant information just arranged differently to those they were obviously used to. The room went quiet, one of the other auditors whispered to their colleague and then asked if they could take a break.

After the break the audit lead was changed, and we continued as if nothing happened. The moral is stay calm review what you are being told is wrong as it is explained to you and don’t be afraid to calmly correct the mistake in the most diplomatic way possible. It won’t go against you to have the courage to speak up.

The next one would have been almost comedic if it hadn’t been so tragic. I was asked a question that I did not understand, so asked for clarification, maybe they were using jargon that I was not used to, which can happen. Instead of providing a different question, or explaining their intent, the auditor just repeated the same question again but louder. Thinking they thought I just hadn’t heard I again asked for a different explanation of what they were looking for and again they responded with the same question but louder still.

After repeating this again, I committed the cardinal sin and raised my voice back and asked them to stop reading questions from a set list without understanding what they meant. I immediately apologised and can say have never done anything like that in an audit since. The moral here is that even when the auditor is in the wrong you need to stay calm and polite. In this instance it should have been me that asked for a break and probably sought further support with this audit.

The final one is an example of an unreasonable and ill thought request. In our more environmentally and technological workplaces most of us have moved to electronic quality systems that we can demonstrate on computer screens and even by video links and desktop sharing.

So, when I was asked in another customer audit to print out every document, I was very surprised and gently pointed out the environmental impact and that our electronic systems could be driven by them if they felt that we would manipulate the results by only bringing up preprepared documents. The auditor was having none of this and totally deadpan explained they did not trust computers and wanted everything printed or they were not carrying on with the audit and would recommend not purchasing from us. The irony of all this seemed lost on them as our product was software and it was the development of this they were auditing.

In the end I gave in and printed what turned out to be over 500 pages of double sided A4 just so that the audit had a chance of going well. The moral here is that there are arguments that are not even worth fighting however much the request feels wrong.

These are only a small selection of my auditee tales and I hope you can see that I learnt from each one of them. I will plan to write future blogs with more tales. But for now all those who have been or will be audited take heart that sometimes it is the auditor that is in the wrong.