Never lie to your auditor

This topic came up in the comments to one of my earlier posts, and I've been promising to address it for a while. In a sense I feel funny saying anything, because I think most of us would always tell our auditors the truth anyway. But the very fact that so many people felt the urge to bring the subject up tells me that a few words might be in order.

Image by Roland Schwerdhöfer from Pixabay

The whole question comes up because there are a few people out there who think of an audit purely in terms of getting the certificate at the end. They have no wider perspective, but they know that someone wants them to have a certificate: maybe it's the boss, maybe it's a customer ... it could be anyone. But someone wants it. And so they think backwards: In order to get a certificate, we have to pass the audit; in order to pass the audit, we have to tell the auditor what he wants to hear; so as long as I say things that sound good, we should be fine. Of course this way of thinking about it is wrong every step of the way. But a few people don't see the bigger picture. So that's what I want to spell out here.

There are several different kinds of reasons not to lie to your auditor. Some reasons are immediate and practical, while others take a step back to look at the larger picture. Then, of the practical reasons, some are high-minded and some are low-minded. In order to have a fair distribution, I'll give you one example of each kind.

High-minded practical reasons

The first practical reason not to lie to an auditor is that an audit is supposed to be a value-added activity. The purpose of an audit is to ascertain what is really going on. If you get a bad score in an audit, that's not because the auditor is being mean to you. The score represents a reality about whether your organization is running in a reliable way. If you fail in some area, that's just a flag to notify you of the cold, hard fact that you run big risks in that area. Never mind the audit report—the real worry is that Something Bad is going to happen in that area and it will hurt the whole company. Better fix it now, while the only damage is an unfavorable report, than wait till it blows up in your face. 

From this point of view, lying to your auditor is like disabling your fire alarm: sure, the noise won't interrupt you, but wouldn't you rather know if there were a fire?

Low-minded practical reasons

Another practical reason not to lie to your auditor is that you'll never get away with it anyway. In an earlier post I said that making a convincing fake is five times as hard as doing things right the first time. That's true, but everyone who has ever conducted an audit knows there's more to it. For years I have argued that there is a Special Providence for ISO Auditors, and I've described it like this:

• The client has a drawer full of 100 files. 
• Ninety-eight of those files are perfect. Two are wrong. 
• You, the auditor, close your eyes and randomly pull three files out to check.
• One of the ones you pull out will be wrong.

It's uncanny how often this works. I've had it happen to me when I do internal audits, and I've watched external auditors do the exact same thing. Those auditors wrote us up, too.

So maybe you think you've been really clever and pulled the wool over the auditor's eyes. In another minute he'll gesture at the stack of papers he just handed back to you and ask, "Wait ... can I look at that one again?" And, starting in that moment, the whole story you've spun for him will unravel.

Taking a step back

Those are examples of practical reasons not to lie to your auditor, but there's a whole other kind of reason too: one that is more fundamental than any of these. It's just about asking your team members or colleagues ... Why are we even having this conversation in the first place? Why would it ever occur to you to lie in an audit? Aren't you better than that? From this perspective, all of the practical reasons—you won't get away with it, or you will profit from the information that an honest audit gives you—feel a little discreditable, even though they are valid. Why should we have to give reasons for telling the truth in a case like this? Don't we all know that it's the right thing to do, and a better way to live?

Sure we do. We know this. We've got this.

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In other news, I'll be away from my computer for the next two weeks. So this blog will go on hiatus through the end of April. I'll be back on the first Thursday morning in May. See you then!