Auditing

Sustainable Assurance Solutions offers social compliance auditing services such as SMETA Audits and Growcom’s Fair Farms program at your facility based on your requirements by qualified APSCA Auditors.

What is social compliance auditing? 

A social compliance audit is one of the best ways to understand the working conditions at a supplier site. An auditor physically attends the site – or workplace – of a business, enabling the auditor to assess the conditions on the ground.

Social compliance audits enable businesses to assess their suppliers, monitor the health and safety of workers and signal zero tolerance of human rights abuses such as child and forced labour. Once an audit is complete, buyer and supplier businesses can work together to address any issues, based on a Corrective Action Plan Report (CAPR).

Your business may choose to request an audit of a supplier’s site after reviewing data from the supplier’s Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) responses, or their inherent risk score in our risk assessment tool. Your business may instead choose to use Sedex Virtual Assessment, Sedex’s solution for conducting remote audits.

Alternatively, one of your customers may request for a SMETA audit to be conducted at one of your business’ sites. The audit will help provide visibility of working conditions at your site to your customer and provide you with a Corrective Action Plan (CAPR) you can use to improve working conditions. This in turn can help attract new customers into working with your business. What’s more, you need only complete a SMETA audit at a site once and you can share it with multiple customers via the Sedex platform.

SMETA, the world’s leading social audit

SMETA (Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit) assesses a site based on their organisation’s standards of labour, health and safety, environment and business ethics. Sedex believes these are key areas for assessing an organisation’s responsible business practices and meeting social compliance.

SMETA is designed to help auditors conduct high-quality audits that encompass all aspects of responsible business practice. It is also designed for suppliers to share one audit with multiple customers, meeting multiple customer requirements and reducing duplication and audit fatigue. Only audit companies (and their auditors) that meet a set of criteria set out by Sedex can conduct SMETA. SAS is known as a Sedex Affiliate Audit Company and is an independent organisation from Sedex.

SAS as an Affiliate Audit Company (AAC) is a third party that is authorised to deliver SMETA audits on behalf of your business. We can conduct SMETA audits and access the functionalities and benefits of the Sedex Advance system to manage data from multiple locations in one account.

You can register via www.sedex.com and download the SMETA guidance documents to support you through the SMETA audit process.

Growcom’s Fair Farms Standard

Growcom’s Fair Farms program is an industry-owned social compliance training and certification program which has been designed to help growers improve their compliance with workplace laws and to demonstrate to buyers and the community that they treat workers in a fair, ethical, and responsible manner. 

Fair Farms Certification Pathway:

1. Register with Fair Farms via www.fairfarms.com.au
2. Complete an online self-assessment (OSA). This usually takes a couple of hours, and the results determine what training may be required. The results are confidential.
3. Complete training, if required, which is delivered through the Fair Farms online learning modules and by the Fair Farms team through telephone consultation and webinars.
4. Farmer undertakes an audit with an independent third-party audit program like SAS Global which must take place during peak season. How well you do in your audit determines the re-certification and audit cycle which can be either 1,2 or 3 years. 
5. Achieve certification. 

For more information or to book an audit, please contact us.

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