Just ran across this (hattip to user on LinkedIn) op-ed piece in a 2002 USAToday edition, by David Meister. He perfectly captured the source of the problems facing the ISO 9001 scheme:
[The] problem of auditor independence is not, ultimately, about the consulting services. Conflicts are built into the system itself.
Auditors are supposed to be independent of management, providing a neutral certification that … fairly reflect the business. Yet who hires the auditors, pays them, retains or fires them?
Answer: The company they are supposed to be auditing. Even without a dime’s worth of consulting, auditors are conflicted. It’s as if a restaurant could select and pay for its own health inspector.
The thing is, Meister isn’t a quality professional, and wasn’t even talking about ISO 9001. Instead, he was summarizing the problems within the financial auditing world, coming on the heels of the Enron collapse.
Of course, the accounting profession has only itself to blame for its current problems. It devised the standards and has aggressively fought off outside regulation.
Sound familiar?
What this tells us is that the ISO 9001 scheme could have learned from the Enron debacle as much as 15 years ago, and put in place controls to ensure true CB objectivity and internal enforcement mechanisms through the strengthening of accreditation rules and related compliance. Instead, we see the opposite: lax rules written by the offending, corrupt CBs themselves, enforced by a weak-kneed IAF with no spine or motivation to perform the single thing they are tasked with doing.
Anyway, it’s an interesting letter, so go read the whole thing.
Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 35 years’ experience implementing ISO 9001 and AS9100 systems, and helps establish certification and accreditation bodies with the ISO 17000 series. He is a vocal advocate for the development and use of standards from the point of view of actual users. He is the writer and artist of THE AUDITOR comic strip, and is currently writing the DR. CUBA pulp novel series. Visit www.drcuba.world
