SMETA Audit in China 2 Pillar & 4 Pillar Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit

Absolutely! V-Trust’s SMETA audit report is widely accepted by different brands and businesses because V-Trust is an Affiliate Audit Company (AAC) of Sedex, as well as a member firm of APSCA (Association of Professional Social Compliance Auditors).

Remark: An Affiliate Audit Company (AAC) is a third-party that is authorised to conduct SMETA audits on behalf of your business. Only audit companies with a Sedex Affiliate Audit Company account can conduct SMETA audits and access the functionalities and benefits of the Sedex Advance system, which audit companies can use to manage data from multiple locations in one account. V-Trust is an AAC of Sedex and is authorized to perform SMETA audits.

Though sometimes it's even possible to book next-day audit for many manufacturing clusters where V-Trust has a large team of full-time auditors, we recommend booking with us at least 1 week in advance. Early booking is important for appropriate scheduling and good preparation before the audit.

There will be one dedicated account manager who will be assigned as your main contact point at V-Trust. You will receive prompt response whenever you have any questions regarding the SMETA audit arrangement.

Depending on the outcome of risk management and/or audit planning, there are three possible audit notification types:

• Announced audit: audit date is agreed with, or disclosed to, the audited factory
• Semi-announced audit, audit date will fall within an agreed “window”. Audit window can range between 2 weeks to 2 months. A 3-week window is recommended to optimize the result.
• Unannounced audit: no prior notice is given to the audited factory.

The official SMETA audit report, reviewed and signed by an authorized V-Trust technical manager, will be available within 3 days after each audit and can be uploaded to the Sedex system within five days.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us whenever you have any questions. The V-Trust team is always available even after the SMETA audit is completed.

By default, unless the client has special requirements, no indication about the severity of non-compliance is shown in the report which means that no conclusion, no rating score, no “Passed” or “Failed” result is provided for SMETA audit reports, nor is a certificate issued. The client will make the call about the audit result based on the findings during the audit.

There is no expiration date for the SMETA audit report, and the client decides the period of validity with their own criteria. Most clients set one year as the validity period to perform annual audit.

After the Full Initial Audit which is the first time a factory of employment is audited, there is a sequence of audits that, depending on the client’s code and the results of the full initial audit, might be necessary to be conducted such as a Periodic Audit which is used to monitor supplier sites on an on-going basis, or a Follow-up Audit which is used to check the progress against the issues found in the initial audit.

There are three types of Follow-up Audit:

• Full follow-up audit: a full audit, same as initial audit but takes into account previous audit findings.
• Partial follow-up audit: only checks progress against issues found during the previous audit.
• Desktop follow-up audit: can be used for certain corrective actions for which a factory visit is not required and can instead be verified remotely e.g. through photograph evidence or documents provided via email.

Besides SMETA audit, V-Trust also provides other services like pre-shipment inspection, during production inspection, container loading supervision, production monitoring, factory audit, social compliance audit, credit audit, laboratory testing, product certification, etc.