Internal auditing at
Sellafield
Internal auditing plays an important role at UK nuclear giant Sellafield. explains
Sellafield is the company responsible for safely delivering decommissioning, reprocessing, nuclear waste management and fuel manufacturing activities on behalf of the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. The organization works over three sites including the Sellafield site in Cumbria where 10,000 people, including a large number of contractors, are based. The business performs a number of diverse and complex activities, including:
- the manufacture and reprocessing of nuclear fuel
- the handling, treatment and storage of wastes from reprocessing activities
- decommissioning of redundant facilities (clean-up)
- the provision of a wide range of infrastructure and support services to the business.
Audit activity
The Sellafield independent audit team forms part of a business-wide assurance department that has a primary function of providing independent assurance to the managing director and environment, health and safety and quality director. The assurance department has continued to evolve since its introduction in 2004 and the independent audit team’s role in the department has similarly evolved as the assurance process has become increasingly integrated.
The team consists of four full-time auditors with a range of technical knowledge and experience, who perform audits covering environmental, safety, quality, health, security and nuclear safeguards topics, from an annual programme approved by the Sellafield executive. This programme is generated from a risk-based five-year rolling programme of topics.
The audit team works closely with the independent inspection team, which is also a member of the assurance department. The independent inspection team’s role is to check compliance with site procedures and legislation by surveillance and inspection. During independent audits, the role of the auditor is to not only assess compliance with documented arrangements and suggest potential process improvements, but also to share good practice identified from other areas of the business.
While the independent audit team performs audits across the business, each individual directorate has its own programme of self-audits in place. Given the size of the organization, self-audits are essential to ensure coverage of all topics to an appropriate depth.
In addition to performing audits and inspections, the role of the assurance department also includes the management of a scrutiny process. This process analyzes outputs from independent audits and inspections (as well as information from other sources such as reported events and performance indicators) to identify trends and areas of concern that require further action. The process is working well and the collation of intelligence from all sources of assurance has assisted in the identification of some significant issues. Where appropriate, these issues are escalated to the executive for information and action.
Challenges
There are a number of challenges facing the team at Sellafield. These include the changing nature of the work on the site, with a move towards decommissioning and clean up. In addition, the business is moving towards a re-organization to a ‘projectized’ site. This will result in the division of the organization into projects, within which all resources required for the project to perform its day-to-day work will be managed. This differs from the current arrangement where projects buy-in support resource from functional areas.
This requires the audit team to retain an up-to-date knowledge of roles and responsibilities as well as a detailed knowledge of the impact of these changes on the management system.
The future
There is a need to strike the right balance between self-audit and independent audit in the business. Sellafield is to introduce a revised assurance framework over the next two years that will change the emphasis of independent audit and place more responsibility with the directorates to assure themselves of the adequacy of and their compliance with documented arrangements. This will enable the independent audit team to focus more on assessing the overall health of processes and the adequacy of self-audit arrangements rather than performing detailed reviews of compliance in the directorates.
It is envisaged that this revised process will further enhance the robustness of Sellafield’s assurance arrangements and increase customer and regulator confidence in our arrangements.
About the author
Andrea Routledge has been the independent audit team manager at Sellafield for three years
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