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.