HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR AUDITOR IN THE INDEPENDENT
FIELD
Time and again, I get asked the same question: How do you choose an auditor?
Or How do you avoiding choosing a mere pretender or fall prey to another
con game?
The answer is not always that simple.
If it were nobody would ever need to ask a question about what ought to
have been the obvious.
I have written a number of articles on how Auditors should setup a successful
practise, adopt a professional attitude and get trained as best as they can.
In a way I will try to summarize what I already wrote and combine it with
new information.
An auditor is someone you will need to implicitly trust, not just because
you will be confiding in him or her your most inner thoughts and secrets,
but because you need to be certain he will not be fooling around with your
case or surreptitiously treat you like a guinea pig to "experiment" with processes
of his own manufacture.
Would you hand over your entire life savings to the first "car salesman"
that came along and promised, with only PR and Hype, fantastic returns for
your investment?
Then why should you treat your case any differently?
Yet your sanity depends on it!
Stolen life savings can often be rebuilt or recreated. Sanity, rarely so.
ATTRIBUTES OF THE GOOD AUDITOR
The person seeking an auditor would do well to familiarize himself with
the auditor code, so that he can at least clearly know how a true auditor
behaves.
As a rule, the closest the adherence to the auditor code by the auditor,
the more predictable and stable the results and the greater the wins.
Just like any professional, certification or accreditation is highly desirable,
since it demonstrates that someone independent from the auditor has deemed
him to have the set of skills he claims to have.
Bad auditors will always avoid certification and accreditation by anyone
independent from them, or they will claim having such accreditation and validation
that nobody will be able to corroborate. They will claim that such and such
trained them, but have no testimony nor certificate signed by that individual.
They will claim to have been AO auditors when they never did the AO Review
auditor Course, nor actually work in an AO, except as a Class IV. They will
claim to be Class VIs or VIII by virtue of having read some of the materials,
even though they never listened to most of the tapes.
They will self award themselves all manner of training, but holler in protest
whenever a highly classed auditor seeks to verify their claim.
Good auditors will always try to improve their skills. Hubbard said that
the good auditor is "courageous in the extreme". Good auditors are not lazy
and they do not mind correcting themselves and consulting with higher classed
auditors on difficult cases.
Bad auditors will refuse to collaborate with others and refuse any advice
even from highly trained and experienced auditor. One o the Hallmark of the
Bad auditor is that he will refuse or make it extremely difficult to ever
release the pcs folders or be sent to another practitioner, apparently afraid
their inexpert and incorrect handling's will ever be discovered.
Professionalism and High standards are the corner stone upon which the Good
auditor base his practise.
Bad auditors use PR and hype as their only foundation, satisfied that whatever
level of mediocrity they has achieved is "good enough". Just like the house
built on quicksand, it eventually lead to their own debacle (and quite possibly
the one of their public as well).
Hubbard appropriately summarized the success of an auditor by the following
lines found in Advanced Procedures and Axioms": "An auditor is most successful
when he has achieved an inexorable self-confidence in himself, in his tools,
in his attitude toward the preclear and in the results he means and determines
to achieve".
A Chart of Human Evaluation for Auditors
Just like Cases can be evaluated on the Chart of Human Evaluation, so can
auditors.
At the top would be the auditor who applies the technology correctly in
the correct way. His attitude toward those who squirrel around or are mere
pretender, will be, if he see fit to express his opinion, limited to the
actual details of the misapplication, leaving alone ad hominem statements,
or those based on other peoples personality or alleged "unsavoury past".
The Auditor at such a level will seek to associate himself or herself with
other well proven auditors and highly trained auditors and will express his
approval for the maintaining of high ethical and technical standards of professionalism.
Lower, as the auditor, as a practitioner approaches the Antagonism band,
will be denounce ferociously anyone who challenges his skills or the quality
of his or her application, even when their target is a well meaning individual.
Lower still, plain insults, black Propaganda with lies and exaggeration
and seeking to tarnish as possible anyone who disagree with their views manifest
themselves. Sometimes, long gone and well intended individuals will be the
target of their hatred and the auditor at that level will deliberately twist
historical facts to adjust it to its fantasies about intricate conspiracies
and alleged suppressive. Often the auditor will not be afraid to indicate
his disagreements with the standards application of the Tech and fail to realize
mutual out-rudiment situations he is generating, or that by his actions, he
is undermining the pc trust in the auditor.
From that level on down, the auditor , rather than seek to understand the
technology by its merits and agreement with the fundamental Axioms, will try
to have a favourite cut off date: say 1978 (or 1982) and automatically consider
anything published after that date is as bad as the work of the Devil himself.
Lower still one finds, as one approaches the lower and more submissive band
of the Chart of Human Evaluation, an effort to "appease". This is manifest
by utter tolerance of the most contradictory ideas and most fantastic tales
and discouraging any "disagreement" as "not nice".
Here one finds the kooky notions that "Quality doesn't count", and focusing
only on quantity, even when false Clears, delusional states, and fantastic
tales about Hubbard and his disciples are spread about like candy to attract
those who are automatically drawn by such ideas. AT that level, the ideas
of such auditors prevent any real effort at correction, and the subject of
Ethics is largely ignored. People seeking to indicate technical violations,
raise standards or applying any form of Ethics are viewed as arrogant.
At the bottom of the scale one finds the attitude that anything goes. The
auditor no longer see anything wrong with mixing practises, justifying it
by the fact that he keeps each practise individually "separate".
They feel that standard tech-wise, nothing is truly right or wrong and that
there ought to be an infinity of "Tech standards". Total tolerance of any
wrongness is preached claiming that Society has no right to enforce a common
reality on others. The ultimate goal of such auditors will be to accomplish
nearly infinite results in almost no time and with less effort that it takes
the average human to brew a cup of coffee. Often the delusional claims that
"Making statics in no time" is the ultimate achievement are not only made,
but frantically sought after.
Just like the apathy case, the auditor who has sunk to that level, no longer
recognize "authority" in its simplest form and conceives that a benevolent
form of anarchy is the ideal form of running a group or organization.
