SMETA Audit

SMETA (Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit) is the most widely used social audit in the world

SMETA is Sedex’s social auditing methodology, enabling businesses to assess their sites and suppliers to understand working conditions in their supply chain.

What is social auditing? 

A social audit is one of the best ways to understand the working conditions at a supplier site. An auditor physically attends the site – or workplace – of a business, enabling the auditor to assess the conditions on the ground.

Social audits enable businesses to assess their suppliers, monitor health and safety for workers, and signal zero tolerance of human rights abuses such as child and forced labour. Once an audit is complete, buyer and supplier businesses can work together to address any issues, based on a Corrective Action Plan (CAPR).

Your business may choose to request an audit of a supplier’s site after reviewing data from the supplier’s Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) responses, or their inherent risk score in our risk assessment tool. Your business may instead choose to use Sedex Virtual Assessment, Sedex’s solution for conducting remote audits.

Alternatively, one of your customers may request for a SMETA audit to be conducted at one of your business’ sites. The audit will help provide visibility of working conditions at your site to your customer, and provide you with a Corrective Action Plan (CAPR) you can use to improve working conditions. This in turn can help attract new customers into working with your business. What’s more, you need only complete a SMETA audit at a site once and you can share it with multiple customers via the Sedex platform.

SMETA, the world’s leading social audit

SMETA (Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit) assesses a site based on their organisation’s standards of labour, health and safety, environment and business ethics. Sedex believes these are key areas for assessing an organisation’s responsible business practices and meeting social compliance.

SMETA is designed to help auditors conduct high quality audits that encompass all aspects of responsible business practice. It is also designed for suppliers to share one audit with multiple customers, meeting multiple customer requirements and reducing duplication and audit fatigue. Only audit companies (and their auditors) that meet a set of criteria set out by Sedex can conduct SMETA. These are known as a Sedex Affiliate Audit Company, and are independent organisations from Sedex.

The auditing process

What is an Affiliate Audit Company?

An Affiliate Audit Company (AAC) is a third-party that is authorised to deliver 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.

Over 40,000 SMETA audits are uploaded onto the Sedex platform every year. 

SMETA workflow guidance

If you are new to SMETA and want to know more about ethical auditing and SMETA you can find step by step guidance below. Whether you are a supplier preparing for your SMETA audit, an auditor using SMETA or a buyer who needs their suppliers audited.

SMETA Guidance

We provide a range of guidance documents to support our members throughout their site audit process and auditors conducting SMETA audits. All documents reflect the latest version of SMETA 6.1.

• SMETA 6.1 Best Practice Guidance (pdf): A best practice guidance on conducting ethical trade audits
• SMETA 6.1 Measurement Criteria (pdf): A set of instructions on the items to be checked by auditors
• SMETA 6.1 Summary Guidance (pdf): What’s new in SMETA 6.1 & FAQs

SMETA support documents:

• Guide to completing a SMETA Report 6.1 (pdf)
• Guide to completing a SMETA CAPR 6.1 (pdf)
  These have been put together using fictitious information to demonstrate to SMETA users how to complete a SMETA report. Please note the example uses typical information from China; it may vary for other countries.

Source: SMETA Guidance | Sedex