Can I use an external audit body to conduct an internal audit?

Hi,

I am new to SQF and its terminology. Can our facility pay an accredited auditor (NSF, FSNS, etc) to conduct an annual audit against the SQF standard and would still meet the "internal audit" requirement? Obviously this would be a separate audit from the actual SQF audit as well as different auditing company to avoid conflict of interest. We have been doing our own audit without support from corporate and I found that the quality of our internal audit is quickly declining.

Thanks

I am assuming you are speaking of your annual SQF system review - internal audit.

The answer would be no to having an outside auditor do the review as it is an intimate endeavor that is normally carried out by Senior Mangement and SQF Practitioner.

I have been a signer on a couple of yearly reviews, however I was not the only one - again, it was senior management and the SQF Practitioner, I just participated.

Hi, no i am not talking about the reviewing portion of the standard (2.1.3 Management Review where the SQF system in its entirety shall be reviewed at least annually). We will continue to do the management review as site leadership

I am talking specifically about the internal audit standard 2.5.5 to verify the effectiveness of the system. When I was with a bigger company and was following FSSC, we were able to hire an external auditor (different from the certification body) come and conduct our internal audits and use that to meet the standard. Wasn't sure if we can do the same thing with SQF

It is staff that is supposed to do the internals.

2.5.5.2 Staff conducting internal audits shall be trained and competent in internal audit procedures.

Technically, it does not say you can't get an outside auditor, have never heard of that before, but there is always a first.

Just curious, if corporate does not support you, how do they handle on-going improvements as called for in SQF?

I came from a giant company so internal audits always handled by corporate, the company would either be sending folks from corporate to audit us which technically still considered "internal audit," or utilize a third party which never had been questioned by the FSSC. It is not the case at my new company where each plant handle its own SQF system. There is no "centralize" Food Safety and Quality department in headquarter that have the resource to send us audit folks. Hence my original comments about support from corporate. I am not refering to the continuous improvement support since we continue to get that.

I am looking for external auditor because looking at the previous internal audit reports, they never "found" anything so I dont think it is working as we really want it to. By using someone else that is not involved at all would help us improve our process and take away the bias or God forbid pencil whips just to complete the standard (and please don't interpret this as we are pencil whipping)

Thanks for the clarity.

I didn't think pencil whipping at all.

I thought about needed training and direction.

Suggest you skip the SQF Auditor, get an SQF Consultant and have him/her do an indepth audit with all the internal auditors present - you'll hit a number of needs including getting the audit and having your internal auditing team trained at the same time.

This is what we are doing this week at our client's seafood company, their past internal audits are noting more than OK on everything, so we are conducting an indepth audit and training the team at the same time.