Pilots in remote auditing

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A new age of auditing
Piloting phone surveys using worker voice technology
Evaluating remote auditing approaches
Moving forward with hybrid audits
Download project outputs

Introduction

Project details

Title: Pilots in Remote Auditing

Project Lead: Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), Linking Environment and Farming (LEAF), Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC), Fair Trade USA

Project partners: Assurance Services International (ASI), Ulula

Duration: February 2021 – June 2021

Contact: ISEAL Innovations Fund - fund@isealalliance.org

Funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs SECO and IDH, The Sustainable Trade Initiative, through the ISEAL Innovations Fund

A new age of auditing

The COVID-19 pandemic has made traditional on-site audits unsafe and has put pressure on sustainability systems to find effective ways to assess compliance remotely. To aid with this necessary adjustment, ISEAL has created guidance on remote auditing, and the Innovations Fund has supported four projects which exemplify the effort to rapidly adapt to the circumstances, testing the adoption of new technology and new procedures that could make remote auditing a permanent feature of assurance models across different systems.

Piloting phone surveys using worker voice technology

Fair Trade USA and the Better Cotton Initiative piloted worker voice tool Ulula in two different settings: factories and agriculture. The projects showed that significant effort was needed to reach and convince agricultural workers to respond to the mobile phone survey compared to factory workers, and that data privacy considerations can be a challenge. However, the tool provided useful data and insights on worker conditions, and helped identify key risks without needing to be on-site.

Man browsing tablet in greenhouse, (c) pexels

Evaluating remote auditing approaches

The projects by RJC and LEAF focused on evaluating the effectiveness of different remote auditing practices temporarily allowed through the pandemic. The found that building trust with participants is particularly challenging during off-site, time-sensitive audits, and that prior understanding of social issues is crucial. The remote audits carried out were as good as on-site audits in terms of identifying areas of non-compliance. And the use of multiple sources of data produced a clearer picture of the level of risk. However, a long-term integration of remote auditing practices would require robust guidelines for auditors.

Farmers checking soil quality © boonchok

Moving forward with hybrid audits

These pilots highlight the feasibility of carrying out effective remote auditing in the absence of on-site visits without compromising the robustness of assurance models. All four projects concluded that remote auditing will not completely replace on-site auditing, but it can complement it and that hybrid models are a promising solution in the long-term. Using a risk-based approach can optimise the value of remote audits, as well as identifying which parts of an assurance model would benefit the most from being remotely audited.

Download project outputs

Lessons learned from remote auditing pilots

Remote Auditing Pilot Projects

A compilation of the lessons learned from four pilot projects in remote auditing from Responsible Jewellery Council, LEAF Marque, Beter Cotton Initiative, and Fairtrade USA. LEAF Marque and the Responsible Jewellery Council looked at the extent to which remote auditing could provide an alternative to in-person on-site visits, while the two other pilot projects used a remote phone survey based on worker voice technology to carry out interviews with workers in factory settings (in the case of Fair Trade USA) and in an agricultural setting on cotton farms (Better Cotton Initiative – BCI). The pilot projects presented here outline their solutions, results, lessons learned, and next steps.

Remote auditing pilot projects

A compilation of the lessons learned from four pilot projects in remote auditing from Responsible Jewellery Council, LEAF Marque, Beter Cotton Initiative, and Fairtrade USA. LEAF Marque and the

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