Social audit as a tool of civil society aimed at ensuring the sustainability

Abstract

A theoretical justification of the conducting a social audit was carried out, which involves the following stages: familiarization stage - to determine the expediency of the procedure; the initial stage is necessary to determine the executors; the organizational stage involves coordination between the contractor and the customer; during the experimental stage, the necessary information is collected; at the analytical stage, indicators of compliance of the state of the objects with the standards are compared; at the final stage, reporting documentation is prepared; at the completion, there is a meeting with the customer and a discussion of the results. The specified stages systematize the organizational process and contribute to the qualitative implementation of the social audit procedure as a whole. The definition of “social audit” has been clarified as a set of control measures in the form of monitoring, audits, inspections, surveys, questionnaires, which are carried out by stakeholders in order to determine the degree of social responsibility of the enterprise. The main criteria for the classification of social audit are summarized and systematized, namely: its functional purpose (social audit of compliance, efficiency audit). Characteristic features, advantages and disadvantages of auditing procedures performed by external and internal auditors are given.