The US Food and Drug Administration is planning to outsource more of its international factory inspections to third-party auditors, Bloomberg Businessweek reports.

The announcement comes in the wake of a September 2010 report from the Government Accountability Office criticizing the FDA’s lack of oversight of foreign pharma manufacturing plants, many of which have never been inspected. According to the report, the agency inspects drug facilities abroad once every nine years on average, compared with once every two to three years for plants on local soil.

“We recognize that third-party inspection programs need to be a bigger part of the discussion because we can’t do all the work ourselves,” John Taylor, FDA acting principal deputy commissioner, said at a conference in Washington, DC last week. “We’re looking at anything, anything and everything that will allow us to leverage our resources better.”

For more on the FDA’s ‘Beyond Our Borders’ initiative, check out our news story from last year.