Poor conduct of audit, can we file a complaint?

Hi, Please enlighten me. We underwent HACCP/GMP Certification. This is a 3 day audit covering 14 HACCP Plan.  For the first 2 days, audit was on time and request of documents were presented. However, on the last day of audit, Auditors were asking humongous documents which was lasted for 16 hours. all Auditees' were already exhausted, tired and restless. We are very disappointed on the conduct of audit. Plus we don't agree on their assessment, due to time constraint we were not able to defend some of our haccp plan. What are your recommendation? can file a complain? for your assistance please.

Thank you

Hi, Please enlighten me. We underwent HACCP/GMP Certification. This is a 3 day audit covering 14 HACCP Plan. For the first 2 days, audit was on time and request of documents were presented. However, on the last day of audit, Auditors were asking humongous documents which was lasted for 16 hours. all Auditees' were already exhausted, tired and restless. We are very disappointed on the conduct of audit. Plus we don't agree on their assessment, due to time constraint we were not able to defend some of our haccp plan. What are your recommendation? can file a complain? for your assistance please.
Thank you

Yes, you can file a complaint with the audit company regarding the duration for the duration of the audit as well as defense of the audit.

HI,

i know that feeling lol

Last audit which we had in our place took nearly 10 hours and that's only 3 HACCP plans, one high risk and 2 low risk. I cant complain about the auditor itself ( I would probably asked for the same docs, but not read them so thoroughly :), in the end there were just some recommendation for more procedures to include.

if I were in your shoes , I would reduce the HACCP study to minimum, cos 14 seems a lot.

I'm not sure if you can complaint about that, I assume it depends on the non-conformance they had pointed out to you.

Of course you can raise a complaint to  your CB. For everything that you are not satisfied with. A certification body is a service supplier and should a deliver a good service to you.

In above posts is to reduce the number of HACCP plans. This is not possible. An HACCP plan is related to a product groups. It seems that you have a lot of product groups in your company. It also seems that this time is really needed, because the audit time was exceeded that much.

It is very good that the auditors thoroughly looked at all the documents and were not skipping documents due to time limitation, however, they should have decide during the audit that they will come back another day. More than 12 hours is way too much for an audit day. Especially for auditees.

What was the outcome of the audit?

Will your complaint be related to audit time planning, exceeding audit time, not deciding to come a fourth day, the attitude of the auditors, or too the outcome of the audit?

If it is the last one you can instead of raising a complaint also raise an appeal. You should have received information from your CB how to this. If not, just request for it.

Good Luck.

Hi Ruzelle,

Yes, you can file a complain to your audit company but the process is quite tedious.

What I did with my last audit for QMS - one of the auditors gave us a major - was that I appealed to the lead auditor and submitted a rebuttal letter to the findings of that one auditor the next day after the audit.

Upon their review, my appeal was granted and the major was reduced to minor.

For the surveillance audit, I also asked the audit house not to include the same auditor, which was again granted.

One thing you need to remember when filing a complaint is that you should do it while the final audit report is not yet submitted by the lead auditor, otherwise your complaint will have to be submitted to a higher level and that would make it complicated. 

Regards,

Mae

Hello Ruzelle

Yes you can file complaint to the auditing group for their conduct and the results, provided that the audit report is still not finalized. You can still voice out your objections for a particular finding that you think is not appropriate or not stated well.

Sometimes auditing groups have "customer" feedback forms that they request their audited company to fill up.

I am curious on a detail: is the auditing group a regulatory entity?

Hi Ruzelle,

Why do you think it ended 16 hours? Maybe 3 days were not enough to cover 14 HACCP Plans. But, of course, you can file formal complaint. You can ask your CB on how to file complaint.

From the information you've given, it sounds like an audit which went badly.  When a day is lengthened it normally indicates things have gone a bit badly or things have been disorganised.  It sounds like the latter wasn't true so perhaps it was the former, perhaps they found something which caused them to dig further?  

I don't think you can challenge any audit on the length of the day or asking difficult questions; you can only challenge it on the findings.  Are the findings true?  Do they genuinely contravene the standard?  If the answer is yes and yes then you don't have a leg to stand on.  If you felt the findings weren't true then perhaps you have a claim but you really should have challenged this at the time, (however tired you were.)  If they aren't against the standard (or it's unclear or open to interpretation) then that's far easier to challenge.

Thank you so much guys for the comfort and advise. well in turns out that 2 HACCP Plan were excluded in the certification. Noted on your suggestions. we supply more than 20products that is why we have 14 plans. Salamat!!

Hello Ruzelle

 

Yes you can file complaint to the auditing group for their conduct and the results, provided that the audit report is still not finalized. You can still voice out your objections for a particular finding that you think is not appropriate or not stated well.

Sometimes auditing groups have "customer" feedback forms that they request their audited company to fill up.

I am curious on a detail: is the auditing group a regulatory entity?

the auditing group is SGS Philippines. Thanks

Hi,

                  I feel they have failed as Service providers,they should have combined the HACCP plan based on common category like cooking or freezing and minimised to 4 or 5 groups.Also they should have the fixed time frame to complete the audit /man day for the process which is a standard practice.

Thanks

Melvin

Hello,

IMO, a 14 HACCP plan can't be done in 3-day 8 hours audit. Especially if there are many questions in your documents. Auditors are also very careful in doing audits, because they are very much liable on whatever findings and rating they give to your company. 

regards,

redfox