Suppliers' Audit

Supplier audits are increasingly perceived as best practice across a wide range of industries, especially for organisations having outsourced a considerable portion of their services to external suppliers and thus having a high dependency on the external supplier’s performance. The necessity for auditing external suppliers is constituted in the fact that risks, deriving from external suppliers, are, despite the ECB’s contractual right to audit the performance of external suppliers, currently not sufficiently or not systematically identified, measured, consolidated, analysed and/or reported within the ECB, neither in a vertical manner (e.g. by aggregating all risks of all contracts related to a single external supplier) nor in a horizontal manner (e.g. by aggregating all risks of the same type across multiple external suppliers and contracts).