Should you do regular formal internal environmental audits?

It depends. Unless you are sure that you have the financial resources andmanagement commitment to fix the problems you uncover in your internal audit, you probably should not be doing it. Why? From a compliance standpoint, there is nothing worse than having a long list of environmental problems that you have uncovered but uncorrected. They call that a smoking gun.

The purpose of your internal audit program should be to uncover small or festering environmental issues and fix them before they become too costly. Every time you walk through your plant, you are in effect performing an audit. When you say some problems, you bring it to the attention of palnt management and you make sure that they follow through with the corrective action.