Reporting the results of audits

The standard requires the results of the audits to be recorded and brought to the attention of the personnel having responsibility in the area audited. 

Audits of practice against procedure or policy should be recorded as they are observed and you can either do this in note form to be written up later or directly onto observation forms especially designed for the purpose. Some auditors prefer to fill in the forms after the audit and others during the audit. The weakness with the former approach is that there may be some dispute as to the facts if presented some time later. It is therefore safer to get the auditee s endorsement to the facts at the time they are observed. In other types of audits there may not be an auditee present. Audits of procedure against policy can be carried out at a desk. You can check whether the documents of the quality system satisfy all the clauses of the standard at a desk without walking around the site, but you can t check whether the system is documented unless you examine the operations in practice. There may be many activities which make the system work that are not documented. 

The audit report should state the results of the audit, what was found compliant as well as what was found noncompliant. 

As the use of computer networks become more widespread, auditing the practice against procedure will be possible without leaving your desk and can be carried out without the auditee knowing. 

Whichever the approach, the report should be presented to the manager of the area audited if several managers are affected, the report should also be presented to the manager above them. However, audit reports should not be issued to a person s manager without their knowledge and agreement. 

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