After reading all these posts, I still think it's a bizarre question which has no good reason behind it.
Then I take it that you see no good reason for an auditor to make an attempt to gage the depth of penetration of the system he's auditing. Do you expect auditors to be robots, applying the same yes/no, black/white legalistic interrogatories everywhere they go? Is there no room for using one's experience to develop audit strategy?
Even if 'top management' selected the person as the Management Representative, why would someone go ask them who that is?
Who else has the authority to appoint an MR? Would you not consider it significant if a CEO were to be found ignorant in this regard?
I 'hear' all the responses about getting access to the MR, or similar, however, even if everyone knows the name, height and inside leg measurement, there's no 'benefit' to posing the question.
But is there any benefit in the
knowledge? In other words, if it can be shown that in the best companies (irrespective of ISO) people are generally aware of the structure of the hierarchy, and who's responsible for what, and in under-performing companies the opposite is true, how can an attempt to understand the depth of penetration of the system be considered "bizarre"?
It seems to me that it's another case of lazy auditors and organizations preparing to do anything to pass the audit.
Non sequiturs. How can an auditor who is doing
more than what's barely necessary be considered lazy? "Lazy" is going through the motions, and doing the same thing today that you did yesterday in a company a thousand miles away, in a completely different industry. I have no idea what "preparing to do anything to pass the audit" means. Would you rather see only the bare minimum necessary to pass the audit? In either case, the auditee will pass, but do you see no value in the auditor actually learning something?