ISO 19011: your view

The latest draft of ISO 19011, the guidelines for quality and environmental management systems auditing, is now available for comment. The ISO 19011 revision working group developed the standard to committee draft stage after a week-long meeting in Cairo in June.

One aim of the meeting was to ensure consistency between the new draft and ISO/IEC 17021, looking in particular at developing requirements for third-party auditor competence in the draft part 2 of the standard. The group working on the competence section has produced guidance on ‘sectors’ instead of the ‘technical areas’ in ISO/IEC 17021 and competence is still based on education and experience instead of demonstrated competence.

Other key issues discussed were the role of ‘audit risk’ in the standard and the distinction between the risk of an audit not being carried out effectively and risk-based auditing – where an audit is planned taking into account risk of an organization’s products and processes. The controversial decision was made to take out risk-based auditing.

A new area for the standard is remote auditing with a new help box explaining a matrix for four types of audit methods – onsite, remote, interactive and non-interactive. There is also further guidance on effective sampling in the draft.

As this standard covers a fundamental part of what IRCA certificated auditors do on a daily basis and the proposed changes are far ranging, IRCA will be providing further information on the standard’s development.

A thread has already been started on the forums and IRCA would welcome your thoughts on the standard. Any auditors who wish to take a more formal part in the review of the draft should contact Paul Simpson at psimpson@irca.org