I don't work in the airline industry, I do work in aviation management.
- A copy of every major technical recommendation that I sign off is checked by CAA.
- Annually my office is audited by (usually) a 3-man team from Gatwick, who amongst other things go through my practice of procedures, documentation control. I seem to alternate between getting a CAA flight test engineer or a structures engineer going through all my most recent technical approvals with me, and often asking for changes to working practice (which they usually come back and check a few months later).
- All of our staff who are allowed to sign anything related to aviation have their work checked at this audit, and any issues brought up with them.
- If I want to do anything new (for example a new type of engineering analysis method) I have to submit to regular reviews of it's use by CAA specialists until they are satisfied that my department will never make a mistake.
- And yes, they have got involved in our man-management issues on occasion too (usually to my intense annoyance).
- Our contingency planning, in case of system failure, fire in the archives, etc. get's reviewed against minimum acceptable standards.
If that isn't independent competence and currency checks, I don't know what is. Our accounts department is annually audited by an independent firm of accountants, so don't really need anybody else doing it. Likewise our workplace health and safety is annually audited by somebody nominated by the Health and Safety Executive, so the same applies.
If this isn't going on in the flying heavy-metal world I for one would be very annoyed, because it would indicate yet another area where us "little-players" in the light aircraft industry are treated differently because we're too small to fight it (or more to the point, others are big enough to get away without applying best practice).
As it happens we don't have any form of ISO9000 approval, but that's just because we don't need that particular piece of paper.
My occasional currency checks as a pilot are frankly quite gentle by comparison, but I accept that in the little aeroplane world these are necessarily a lot less hard work than those applying to heavy-metal crews.
G