China shoe factory fire exposes audit gaps

FUJIAN – A fire at a footwear factory in China’s Fujian province that killed 28 people has highlighted gaps in what buyers and stakeholders can learn from publicly available audit records, after an apparently current Amfori BSCI assessment was listed for the site.

The tragic incident underlines both the limits of what can be inferred from public audit listings and the difficulty of maintaining safe conditions between periodic assessments and during day‑to‑day production.