• Auditing
• 2021-08-27
• Mr. Wasim Firoz

Everything About Business Environmental Audit

Environmental Audi is a tool for auditing that helps businesses to analyze and examine their environmental performance to identify how management compliance and the working process perform. Today. Environmental auditing is important for every business, it doesn’t matter what size and type of business you are in. Understanding environmental performance is complicated in comparison to understanding other functional areas like financial and commercial. The environmental performance impact is not always 100% clear from normal performance. That’s why an environmental audit is conducted on a regular basis to identify and measure the performance outside normal performance.

What are the benefits of Environmental Auditing?

There are different benefits of environmental auditing based on your objective and scope of auditing. 

1. To identify how businesses meet the legal requirements.
2. To Demonstrate environmental responsibility.
3. To demonstrate environmental policies are implemented. 
4. To identify and understand interactions of products, services & activities.
5. Meeting specific statutory reporting requirements.
6. To identify and understand environmental risks are managed appropriately.
7. To develop and implement an ISO 14001 EMS.
8. To save money and improve environmental performance.

Types of Environmental Auditing

There are mainly three types of environmental auditing. These types of auditing are very helpful and organizations also rely on them.

1. Management Environmental Auditing -  Management performs the environmental auditing to identify and measure their environmental performance are meeting expectations or forecasting.
   
   
2. Compliance Environmental Auditing -  We conduct this type of auditing to identify and understand, review the site or company's legal compliance status (which can be important and costly).
   
   
3. Functional Environmental Auditing - To focus on the environmental element or impact, such as water or electricity.

Who Can Conduct an Environmental Audit?

As per ISO 19011:2012 guidelines, environmental auditors should have personal attributes like perceptiveness, open-mindedness, ethics, tact, and understanding of the procedure, principal and techniques. The auditor should have clear objectives which are auditing and how it applies in different organizations. The team leader of the environmental auditing team should have the ability to plan and resources effectively and also have good leadership and communication skills. 

When you need auditors you should consider the above-given lines to find the best auditor who has adequate skills, knowledge, and experience.

When Do We Need To Conduct An Environmental Audit?

For environmental policy and performance environmental audit is very important for the organization. There are several environmental rules and regulations that apply to every business. Is your business in environmental compliance? Do you have all the permits? You can’t know until you don’t get the environmental audit done by the auditor. If you are not an expert in environmental auditing then you need to get an environmental audit from the best audit firm. So that You can provide documents on which compliance under you are working to inspectors when they visit your sites.

How To Perform An Environmental Audit?

In this audit, there are 3 main stages, or we can say phases.

1. Pre-Audit
2. Audit
3. Post-Audit

1. Pre-Audit
   
   - First, We select the people who have good experience and skills to make a good audit team.
   - Make the audit plan
   - Review and request the document which includes Permits or permit applications, Production Records, Reports, and previous audit resort.
   - Prepare the list of questions
   - Begin to fill in the Disclosure of Violation Table as issues are identified.
   
   
2.  Audit 
   
   - Make ground rules
   - Determine and identify the issues
   - Daily information to keep informed.
   - Documents review like  Policies, Compliance, Training, Air/Water/Waste/Noise controls, monitoring and records, Emergency Response Procedures, Response to Complaints, Check documents for completeness, consistency, legal compliance, and whether it’s up to date.
   - Perform site inspection.
   - Check the operation for compliance.
   - Keep simple processes
   - Interact with employees.
   - Discover issues of concern
   - Conduct the last meeting with a report and discuss the issue and find an effective solution.
   
   
3. Post-Audit
   - Make audit reports and Disclosure of Violations.
   - Present the list of issues and areas to concern. 
   - List required action and follow-ups.

To conduct a successful environmental audit, we have to follow the above mentioned points. If you still have any questions and doubts then contact us. We are here to help you.