The single biggest reason carriers flunk facility audits is maintenance. The law says you must have a written maintenance policy and you have to follow it. If you don’t, you fail.

In this, the final article of my series on “Surviving a Facility Audit,” I will tell you how to make sure that doesn’t happen.

In anticipation of an audit, your best defence is to write a maintenance policy that you can live with. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself exceeding your own guidelines and ultimately flunking the audit.

Say your policy states all your trucks get a PM every 25,000 km. I’m sure you do your best to ensure it’s followed. But if trucks are regularly coming in late, take a hard look at your practices to see how to get them in on time. Maybe it’s a matter of rewriting the policy, just so you don’t keep breaking it.

A good maintenance policy will “under promise and over deliver.” For example, maybe your policy states a truck has to get a PM every 50,000. Good policy, but you don’t have to let the trucks go that long between PMs. It’s smart to have a built-in cushion, just for unforeseen circumstances.

The auditor will want to see how you track your vehicle inspections and annuals. Do you use a computer program to remind you of PMs or inspections? And what sort of records do you have to show which items were inspected?

None of your vehicles can operate with an expired annual inspection. The auditor will want two years’ worth of proof.

When the auditor chooses a sample of vehicles to inspect he will choose vehicles that have had defects found at roadside. This will ensure that all defects found at roadside were repaired.

Auditors will also want to see drivers’ vehicle-inspection reports. Far too often drivers will find a defect in the yard or terminal and have it repaired before departing, so in the driver’s mind it never was a defect and does not get recorded on their vehicle-inspection report. However, that repair generated a work order in the shop. The auditor will try to match work orders with VIR’S and when they can’t a violation will occur. In other words repairs don’t magically appear in maintenance files without someone first finding the defect.

Don’t forget that this all applies to owner-operators, too, so they must be willing to share their maintenance records with you as well.

Finally, audits differ slightly from province to province. For audit-survival tips, contact your provincial ministry of transport. I also recommend conducting mock audits.

Because if you fail the real item, you’re looking at conditional or unsatisfactory ratings, thousands of dollars in fines or — worst-case scenario — the loss of your operating authority.