Quality Audits in Municipality Offices – Evidence from Poland

The paper presents the outcome of the survey which covered 12 Polish municipal offices certified with ISO 9001. The first part of received data concerns different approaches to conducting internal audits utilized by the organizations i.e. number of auditors, number of audits and their length. The second part of the data refers to the findings resulting from the audits and they concern next two indicators i.e. number of indentified nonconformities and the number of corrective activities. The survey has shown that the level of activity of considered offices in the area of internal audits is not very high thus it proved a frequent opinion in literature on the subject that in practice the opportunities given by internal audits are not fully used by organizations. It is reflected by the fact that there are usually less than five corrective actions a year introduced as a consequence of internal audits. Additionally, it was found that the approaches used in an organization recognized as the leader in the area of quality management are not significantly different, in the studied areas, from those used in other organizations.