I recently joined a facility that will be having their certification audit in a few months. A bit of background: I had already worked a few years ago at this facility and the programs were written by me, the site has just followed what I created for these years.
We still need to do the internal audit and management/policy reviews. We are considering doing the internal audit in house (I have a certificate of training for this). My concern is that I joined as the person in charge of the department and would take over the SQF practitioner role. I plan to train someone else to do the internal audit with me (I would be auditing the current SQF practitioner, who will become my backup), but I would still be the lead/main auditor. We are not so small (over 200-300 employees).
In the past, we have hired a consultant to do the internal audit but had always wanted to transition to doing them in house. I am concerned that it will still be considered as 'auditing my own work' since it is the same department, even if someone else is auditing along with me. We prefer to do our internal audit as a 1 week long audit instead of spreading it out, it just works best this way for us and is written in the procedure this way as well.
Note: the current SQF practitioner would be working on the management review/annual reassessment before the internal audit takes place.
Any suggestions or examples are appreciated