Adversaries

I have mentioned in the past how I dislike auditors, and their ability to make up their own rules as to what's required in the environment. They start (usually) with the standards that you've been given, but devolve quickly into their interpretation of what those rules means. Those interpretations are frequently not the ones that you've used in preparing your environment, and occasionally they're not the same as other auditors, either. So, for example, the standard might say 'The work environment shall be well lit with a uniform light on all work surfaces', and you think that having overhead fluorescent lighting -- the bright, cheerless lights you see in discount stores -- will do the trick. The first auditor agrees, but the next one says no, these are not good enough -- they cast shadows, so there are clearly not enough of them; write that up. And then the next auditor comes through, remarks casually on how you sure do have a lot of lights in there -- because you added some, in response to the first -- and oh, look, one of them is flickering. That's not uniform, he says, getting out his auditor's red pencil. And when you send someone to repair it, he fixes a gimlet eye on you and asks where the procedure is written up that you use to do such repairs; no repair shall be done without it, after all. So you produce it, and he says Hmm...this says that the light repair shall be done with two people, but you did it with just one; write that up. You point out that the second person was right there, and the auditor smiles slightly and replies that while that may be true, that second person was not clearly identified as being part of the light repair team, so, sorry -- and by the way, why was that person standing in the area of the repair if they were not part of the team? Doesn't the repair procedure say that no one should be standing close who isn't working on the repair, lest they be bopped by a dropped light? Write that up.

A company that I used to work for decided that they needed a separate group to orchestrate and coordinate responses to auditors. After a while, they thought it would be helpful to do 'play' audits, where they applied what they had learned over time and audits to see what they could find that an auditors might object to. Some of the time it was based on what a reasonable person could find, and some of the time it was based on their interpretation, like the light bulb story. Very quickly, the company began to treat the play audits like actual audits, and it was almost as bad to be written up by the internal auditor as it would be to be written up by the external auditor -- which meant that the internal auditors got the short, black and white answers. You didn't tell them what you knew they wanted to know, but they didn't explicitly ask for, and you certainly did not tell them of things that they didn't suspect that you knew were problems. They were your adversaries; be careful what you tell them. That they were supposed to be your defense mechanism evaporated.

We're undergoing an audit now, and the person who is supposed to be our 'interface' with the auditors used to be a technician working on our account. Now he's on the Dark Side, and as I told both my wife and a coworker, both of whom agreed, when he worked for us, if he asked a question, he got a full and complete answer. Now he's with Them, and he gets the shortest possible answers, stated in black and white with no greys whatsoever. We trusted him before, but we don't trust him now.

I think that what I hate about audits, and auditors, is twofold: they always find something, and when they do, I feel that I should have known about it. Sometimes, I did know, but didn’t give it rigid attention because I thought it was silly. Sometimes, I didn’t know, for a multiplicity of reasons. Whatever the source, I end up feeling incompetent. I hate feeling incompetent. I don’t care if the organization fails the audit; I care about feeling incompetent. I’ve been trying for six years, intermittently, to get out of this position, and its more than a little ironic that now, when its possible, and even likely, that I finally will, we have not one but two audits either started or on the way.

I know that auditors can perform useful functions. The recent case of ITT shows that. But much of it strikes me as – stupid. And if there’s anything worse than feeling incompetent, it’s feeling so in the defense of something you feel is stupid.