IETP Hosts Annual Auditor Refresher Training to Assure Robustness of the Certification Program

Audit quality is at the heart of the ICTI Ethical Toy Program (IETP), our team is dedicated to providing comprehensive, consistent, and reliable assessments to help businesses evaluate the effectiveness of their social management system in global supply chains. Our robust social certification empowers businesses to mitigate the risk of supply chain disruption and as a result, ensuring products arrive on shelf on time. As we are reassuringly serious about products made by IETP certified suppliers, meeting the standards set by the buyers, IETP expects all our accredited third-party audit partners to adhere to the highest professional standards of credibility, ethics and competence. As the IETP program is ever-evolving to meet the latest needs of the Toy, Child, Entertainment, and Publishing industries, we host an annual Refresher Training course for accredited auditors to ensure their knowledge of our program is up to date, so that when they conduct an on-site audit on our behalf, their understanding of our requirements are aligned with the same standard. In August, our Program Monitoring & Development team hosted a one-day training course to cater to both auditors who could join us in person and those who needed to join virtually, due to COVID-19 restrictions. The training course was divided into 5 sections to emphasize the technical alignment between firms, the ethics and professional behavior required of Auditors during their interactions with suppliers, as well as detailing the quality and estimated timeframe of their reports. The five sections of the training course were as follows:Introduce and explain updates of the IETP program In-depth discussion of certain audit requirements that needed attentionAnalysis of the performance of the firms and share advice for improvementShare investigation results and recommendations for special cases Q&A session to discuss quiresIn addition to the annual Refresher Training course, our team also continues to monitor the quality of accredited firms through regular KPI reviews with senior executives, as well as, an online auditor assessment that enables suppliers to evaluate, and provide feedback on, the performance of the on-site auditors directly.To ensure the integrity of the IETP program, we will continue to offer regular feedback and capacity-building opportunities to our accredited partners. Information on our accredited firms and their auditors can be found on our website, please click for more information.