Which External Auditor is Right for You?

As an internal control system (ICS), we rely on an external auditor to confer on us our legal status and certification for our farmer-partners. The external auditor is the link between us and the USDA, whose approval we are ultimately seeking. Choosing the right auditor is a very important step in the process of becoming a group of certified organic growers.

We just decided this past week on who we would go with after a few months of weighing our options (not that we were lollygagging, just being meticulous). In the end we settled on EcoCert, a company with it’s head office in France and a branch office in Burkina Faso. Maybe the strongest point to recommend EcoCert is that they regularly contract one man (Jean Pierre) as their auditor in Cameroon. JP is a native to the North West Region of Cameroon who currently resides in Douala and works out of Beau. Having our auditor (or at least a man who acts as our auditor’s representative) in country seemed like an invaluable asset. In particular, we felt this would help us to develop a long term relationship with EcoCert; a relationship that has our staff in country at the foundation. With a more remote company, we envision that most of our correspondence would be via email, between their head office (most likely in Europe) and our staff in the US, a chain of communication that would frequently bypass Philip, Cassman, and me.

Proximity was not the only consideration, of course. We expected price to be a large factor, but (surprisingly) the quotes we saw were fairly similar. With one company travel wasn’t included so it seemed lower at first, but with some quick estimations we figured they all came out to just under 3,000 euro. Another factor that weighed heavily in EcoCert’s favor was the company’s responsiveness to our questions during the ‘courting’ phase. Especially given our tight schedule for obtaining certification this year, we were keen on getting an auditor that would be prompt and showed us they understood our urgency and would help us reach our goals.

What didn’t sway us was any company’s reputation or tendency toward being strict or lax in the certification process. This consideration did come up in our internal conversations and we definitely had our biases on who ranked where in this category. In the end, what we decided was that we would hold ourselves to the same standard we imagined that the strictest auditor would expect from us and let whoever we settled on judge us on that. This suits me fine, especially as all the work I’ve done to this point has been based on templates provided by that ‘strictest’ company.

 

Next step: Get JP to Oku to do his thing. We’re through with our internal work in Oku and we’ll be finishing in Mbessa by Friday of this week. After that we’ll be ready for our first test. The idea of being audited has me a little terrified and I guarantee that in the days leading up to it I’ll be having some kind of trouble sleeping. Thank goodness I just got sent a kindle.