When we look for quality auditors, we don’t look for heroes or supermen, we look instead for very ordinary people – men or women – who know what their job is like and are dedicated to it.

If anything, auditing is becoming the job of the century, for many a reasons: organizations need to control themselves, their suppliers and – why not? – their customers. Organizations also need to accurately know their operational context.  In a word, organizational intelligence is a must for effective management.

Since first implementing ISO 9001, quality auditors have become stars in the registration business.  The challenge is that as their prestige has risen so have some complaints.

AUDITING CHALLENGES
Why are there complaints?  There are a number of explanations, that are known – if not not well understood – to those who are impacted by auditing processes.

By its own nature, the auditing process and its main actors – auditors and registrars – are subject to bias that cannot be put aside by simply claiming that auditors – and registrars – have to be objective, independent and transparent.

Auditors who want to seriously do their job have a very tough time doing it.  though they are not required to be heroes or super-people, it often happens that they have to perform as such.

Auditors’ work – when done seriously – is under much commercial pressure by the registrar and the auditee and by the auditee’s customer in case of second party audits.  In case of internal – first party audits, auditors are subtly yet menacingly required not to open the pandora’s box of the organization’s sins.  And, who wants that?

And auditors are under time pressures too not to mention the pressure put on them by hostile auditees’ behavior.

In a word, who would want to be an auditor?

Auditing jobs are also not well paid unless you’re in the financial or head-hunting business.   A good salesman earns twice as much as a typical quality auditor.

So, why is auditing given so much relevance when auditors are not?

It’s like pretending that car assembling lines workers are less important than the cars themselves.

Auditing is a key, instrumental process to risk management from assessment for prediction to processing for prevention.  If we don’t give auditors the important role they deserve, well, it would just be like wanting to ride a flat-tyre bike.