A standard practice of auditing mill designs has developed in the mining industry. The purported aim of this task is to ensure that the mill being offered conforms to the design specification, thus reducing the purchaser's risk. However, careful examination of the auditing methods used in the past shows that this is not the case. In some cases, what auditors have been providing is effectively a quality assurance check of the input data, not a full independent audit of the vendor's design. It will be shown that these past auditing methods have contributed to the stagnation of mill specification development. This lack of specification improvement combined with the current trend towards increased allowable fatigue stress ranges can result in an increase in risk for the purchaser.