Scope limitation

An assessment is only as good as the evidence behind it. Sometimes an assessor simply cannot get enough of it. Villages flood. Records go missing. A stakeholder will not cooperate. The workbook has a name for this problem: scope limitation.

Its own words: "If the social impact assessor is unable to obtain sufficient appropriate evidence, a scope limitation exists."

A scope limitation is serious. It is not a minor inconvenience to shrug off. The workbook says the assessor must do one of three things: express a qualified opinion or conclusion, disclaim an opinion or conclusion, or withdraw from the engagement, where the law allows withdrawal.

Scope limitation sits inside the workbook's wider discussion of evidence quality, alongside competence (is the evidence reliable), relevance (does it bear on the question) and sufficiency (is there enough of it).

The workbook builds scope limitation into its Evidence Building framework (Chapter 5, section 5.8):

Scope limitation arises specifically from a failure on sufficiency: the assessor could not obtain sufficient appropriate evidence. Before reaching that conclusion, the assessor must first try to get more: consider all relevant evidence, whether it supports or contradicts the assessment, and attempt to obtain further evidence where necessary. Only once that further effort fails does a genuine scope limitation exist, and the assessor must then choose one of the three responses.

Illustrative engagement; figures are made up.

An assessor is verifying an NPO's flood-relief project across 20 villages. In 6 of the 20, roads remain washed out months after the flood, and the assessor cannot physically visit to verify beneficiary lists.

Despite trying phone interviews, satellite data and NPO field-staff records, the assessor still cannot gather sufficient appropriate evidence for those 6 villages. This is a genuine scope limitation, covering 30% of the project's villages.

Because withdrawal is not practical this late in the engagement, the assessor issues a qualified opinion, stating clearly which 6 villages could not be verified and why, rather than silently signing off on a clean report.

Chapter 5 (Social Impact Assessment and Social Impact Assessors), section 5.8 (Evidence Building), defines scope limitation as arising from insufficient evidence and requires the assessor to respond with a qualified opinion, a disclaimer, or withdrawal. Section 5.9 then defines the two possible opinions in full. Expect a question asking what a scope limitation is, or what an assessor's three possible responses to one are.

• Scope limitation is about evidence, not about the project's own performance.
• Three responses, not one: qualified opinion, disclaimer of opinion, or withdrawal from the engagement.
• Withdrawal is only an option "where withdrawal is possible under applicable law or regulation."
• Do not confuse scope limitation with a qualified opinion itself — the scope limitation is the cause; the qualified opinion is one possible consequence.