SOFTWARE FOR RECORDS AUDITING DURING INSPECTIONS

Early when the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC) began operating, it started to establish its own inspection procedures, including the auditing of records and the comparison thereof with reports. These procedures, established by the Nuclear Material Accounting Area of ABACC in the second semester of 1994, consist of three working papers named VR-A (summary form), VR-B (comparison form) and VR-C (updating form). One special characteristic of the procedure is that it must be completely performed during the inspection in order to provide a preliminary summary of the results of books auditing to the Operator/National Authority. With the main purposes of making easier the completion of the form by the inspectors and having the results in electronic media in order to facilitate the evaluation of the results and the follow-up of discrepancies, a software was developed to be utilized in field during the inspections using a notebook. The software was completed in 1999 and started to be used in routine basis in the beginning of 2000. The software allows completing the VR-A, VR-B and VR-C forms with the following advantages: a) organizes the activities to be performed; b) checks all the information entered, for example, MBA codes, algebraic sign of element/isotope weight, etc.; c) checks the relationship between different fields to assure that the numeric information entered by the inspector is correct; d) No calculations need to be performed by the inspector manually; and e) have a mechanism of error detection that do not allow to finalize the auditing if there is a discrepancy .between the inspection data and the book data. During the pre-inspection the inspectors receive one diskette with the necessary data to perform the records auditing of the applicable MBA, which is immediately entered in the computer notebook. After the inspection is completed, during the post-inspection activities the inspectors return the diskette with the results of the auditing activities that is immediately processed and the discrepancies