The majority of people who depend on inspection reports never have to consider the unique tension inherent in the work of an independent inspector. The organization that is funding the examination is also the one that could profit or lose based on the results. The organization whose facilities or product the inspector is assessing pays them, either directly or indirectly. However, the inspection’s whole worth, including its existence and its significance to regulators, insurers, and the general public, hinges on the inspector’s decision being made without taking any of that into account. The true challenge lies in actually maintaining that separation throughout thousands of examinations carried out under business pressure.
Standards such as ISO/IEC 17020 have standardized a set of structural approaches to this issue created by independent inspection bodies working in high-stakes markets. The standard goes much beyond merely requesting inspectors to act professionally; it specifies what an inspection organization must have in place in order to legitimately claim impartiality. It is legally forbidden for inspection organizations to provide design, production, or maintenance services for the same equipment that they assess at the structural level. This ban is in place because the incentive to discover problems becomes commercially warped the instant an entity may benefit from doing so and then selling the remedy. It is not a bureaucratic preference to have the two activities in completely different legal bodies. It is the fundamental control of conflicts of interest.
The rationale of impartiality becomes more detailed when it comes to the financial arrangements within inspection organizations. An inspector who has an exceptionally high or low pass rate shouldn’t be monetarily rewarded or penalized in a way that would influence future judgments because staff compensation is designed to be independent of inspection results. In a similar vein, the funding model is designed to keep any one client from accounting for so much of the total revenue that losing them would result in a business catastrophe. Regardless of what its policy documents state, a body that receives 70% of its revenue from a single operator is not fundamentally independent of that operator.
A more subtle issue, the progressive loss of crucial distance due to familiarity, is addressed by inspector rotation. After ten years of annual visits to the same facility, an auditor will begin to form relationships, presumptions, and mental models that influence their search criteria and interpretation of the results. A portion of the knowledge that has been gathered is actually useful. However, rotation rules are incorporated into accredited inspection frameworks as a structural requirement rather than an optional best practice since the risk of “blind spots”—the inability to see something as a potential problem because it has always existed and never produced problems—is so great.
A similar reasoning applied to equipment instead of humans is seen in the calibration requirements for measurement tools. Subjectivity is introduced by visual evaluation. A well calibrated instrument’s reading does not. One category of human judgment is eliminated from the process and replaced with data by digital and automated measurement tools that are kept up to date on documented calibration schedules and traceable to accepted reference standards. This is especially important when the difference between acceptable and undesirable is so small that a slightly altered reading could result in a different consequence. Removing the instrument variance from that computation does not imply mistrust of inspectors. It involves eliminating a source of fluctuation unrelated to the real state of the object being measured.
