On July 11, 2010, an article was published in the EHS Journal titled “EHS Audits – Have We Lost Our Way?” That article was followed a year later by a sequel that explored the topic more fully. The articles elicited numerous thoughtful comments and a lot of general discussion. The premise of the original articles
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Environmental, health, and safety (EHS) audits are supposed to be a collaborative activity in which independent auditors team up with facility personnel to conduct an objective review of the facility’s programs and procedures. Things usually go as planned, but if you encounter any of the following warning signs, your auditor’s radar should be sounding, “
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Environmental, health, and safety (EHS) auditing can be a challenging profession. It is fraught with ethical and technical dilemmas, the need to stay technically and functionally competent, and the need to have interpersonal skills and attributes that only Moses possessed. For example, International Organization for Standardization (ISO) auditing guidelines require auditors to be ethical, open-minded,
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Many organizations have been conducting environmental, health, and safety (EHS) audits for decades now, and as auditors revisit sites on a 2- or 3-year cycle, one of the most frustrating aspects of the audit outcomes is that many of the same or similar findings of noncompliance seem to arise time and time again. This situation
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The great majority of environmental, health, and safety (EH&S) professionals come from a background that is either primarily environmental in focus or primarily health and safety based. As the EH&S auditing profession has evolved, companies have integrated environmental topics with health and safety topics (and sometimes with others such as management systems or sustainability) on
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In December 2011, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published two standards, an updated edition of ISO 19011, Guidelines for auditing management systems, and a new standard covering emergency management, ISO 22320, Societal security—Emergency management—Requirements for incident response. ISO 19011:2011 ISO believes that the revision of ISO 19011 will save money, time, and resources
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On July 11, 2010, an article titled “EHS Audits—Have We Lost Our Way?” was published in EHS Journal.[1] It has since elicited a number of quite thoughtful and extensive comments and much general discussion. The premise of the article was that perhaps environmental, health, and safety (EHS) audit programs have evolved, particularly in the United
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Tablet computers and smartphones are not appropriate work tools for every professional or for every task; it really depends on what you do for a living. For auditors on the go, however, new generations of tablet devices, especially Apple’s iPad and iPhone, are proving to be essential working tools. Savvy auditors find plenty of ways
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Establishing how often to carry out environmental, health, and safety (EHS) audits at sites and facilities considered to be part of the auditable universe can be a trying exercise. Auditing high-risk operations too infrequently can lead to unwanted surprises because of the lack of oversight and governance. On the other hand, auditing too frequently can
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A client of Environmental Resources Management (ERM) was seeking benchmarking data about the organizational location of the environmental, health, and safety (EHS) audit function. In particular, the client wanted to know how common it is to have the EHS audit function report to the internal audit department, as opposed to the corporate EHS department. Since
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