How to Create a Third Party Audit Checklist

Third party audit checklists provide documented information that aid in conducting an assessment and can reduce overall assessment process time while simultaneously improving results quality.

Questionnaires may not always be the most efficient method for understanding a vendor’s protocols; interviews or extracting reports from an agency’s metering tool could prove more productive in gathering insights about them.

Pre-Audit
An audit checklist begins by collecting all of the documentation that will be necessary for the audit, such as process metrics, work instructions, turtle diagrams and control plans or failure mode effects analysis work sheets.

Assemble all relevant audit materials before beginning. This will enable you to scope the audit, identify key risks, and focus additional audit efforts where needed. It also ensures you’re ready to meet client expectations for their audit engagement.

Your auditor may also request additional documents such as software licence documents and vendor consumption reports, along with proof that your agency’s primary contact is available at all times to meet with him/her.

Digital tools can simplify this process for your team by making it easier to collect and store audit information more efficiently. They may also reduce time wasted on tedious manual data entry tasks.

During the Audit
An audit checklist is a tool used by auditors to help collect evidence based on industry standards for food safety, information security, occupational health and safety or quality management systems. Auditing teams often utilize this list when engaging in audit engagements to collect relevant data for inspection; technology such as robotic process automation can assist this process by quickly gathering large volumes of data for audit review by auditors.

At this stage of an audit process, it is critical to identify and prioritize third parties based on their risk level and impact. A vendor that sells office supplies could pose minimal risks because their access is limited to sensitive information and customers don’t interact directly. Conversely, third-party stores and processes customer data have more at stake.

Post-Audit
An external audit can be an anxiety-inducing process for businesses. But by creating an action plan and following it strictly, the process can become less stressful and provide the data-driven decisions necessary to identify weaknesses in systems and make informed decisions moving forward.

As part of its preparations for an audit, businesses must first compile an inventory of third-party relationships and associated risks, including contracts, service level agreements, and compliance reports. Next, categorize vendors based on their level of risk exposure by looking at interactions with the organization as well as potential cyber attacks.

Third-party food safety audits can be an invaluable way to confirm whether a supplier meets FDA FSMA requirements. To facilitate this process, the FDA has created templates which can help auditors compare their standards against FDA FSMA regulations; you can find them on its website.

Conclusions
Documents must be in order prior to initiating any third-party audit, including policies, procedures, manuals, training records and any proof-of-license documents for software being audited.

As part of a third party audit, it is critical to assess each vendor’s risk assessment and monitoring processes in order to assess how much of a threat each third party poses to your organization.

Monitoring third parties that support critical activities should also be ongoing, particularly those with contractual obligations to meet and any significant changes that could impact performance or risk that should be brought up with senior management.

With more laws focusing on data privacy, it is increasingly essential that third-party vendors meet regulatory guidelines and ethical considerations of your company. Any negligence in handling of data by any of your third-party vendors could have serious repercussions for operations, reputation and finances of the organization.