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Usually MR has own desk responsibilities given by his/her departmental head and ISO itself, managing Internal Audits in addition to that across20+ employee company deteriorates the quality of supervision. Same time, if a person is heading Internal Audit team, he/she will expect to be independent and not to report to MR (since MR is also part of department being audited). Any suggestions as how to keep both parties satisfied as well as achieve the organizational objective are requested.
MR will be in deep problem or handicapped if seperate audit dept or audit is oursourced in case their is break down of communicaton between them.
As MR is responsible to ensure document modifications and their implementation (Audt findings may be needed)
MR represents management during certifyng or surveillance audits
MR is reponsible to provide status report on ISO preparedness, including area of weakness or strenghts to focus correctly. (Durng Management review meetings)
Also during external audit , he have to defend the internal audit corrective and preventive action.
So My suggestion is that let MR control, if he is from sales dept and too busy , he can be assigned an deputy MR or supporting person to help him/her out in excuting function satisfactorily ..like
But being myself a external audtor , it is good once in a while to validate system (Internal audit resources )through external internal audit to provide correct picture on complance and implementation
To answer your question:
Management Rep should be part of organisation management, but Internal auditor can be outsourced.
So, yes internal audit can be seperated from Management rep. its a common practice that auditors report to management rep but it is not requirements.
However, there is nothing to prevent auditors from being independent if they follow and reports to the Management rep.
The ISO standard require that auditors be independent from "ACTIVITY" they are auditing and it doesn'y require the auditor to be independent from the "Deprtament".
which means, if you have two production lines (A and B) and both are under the production manager, you can let auditor from production line A audit production line B.
Some organisation don't have a full time auditor but instead they give it as an additional task to employees from other department.
