Institute of Work Health and Safety / Systems

What an audit can and cannot see

Conformance and safety are correlated, not identical.

An audit examines whether the system that was described is the system that is operating: whether the records exist, the reviews happened, the training is current, the controls named in the assessment are present. That is worth knowing and it is a genuine discipline. It is also a check on the paperwork's relationship to itself.

What it cannot readily see is whether the documented system describes the work. An operation can be fully conformant and dangerous, if the procedures were written for conditions that no longer exist and everybody has quietly adapted. It can also be non-conformant and safe, where a competent crew has developed a better method than the one on file and never updated the document.

Both cases are common and the second is more common than the audit literature suggests. Treating every such finding as a deficiency to be corrected by retraining people back onto the original procedure will occasionally make an operation less safe, and will certainly teach the crew not to demonstrate their actual method next time.

The more useful audit conversation asks the person doing the task to describe how it is done, and then compares that to the document, with genuine openness about which one should change. That takes longer and produces information the tick box version cannot.

There is a further limitation worth stating, which is that an audit sees a site on a day. Operations vary enormously between a routine week and a shutdown, a peak period, or a period of staff shortage, and the conditions under which things go wrong are rarely the conditions under which anybody schedules a visit. An audit programme that never observes the difficult periods is describing the operation at its most presentable, which is useful and is not the same as describing the operation.