Is your registrar (CB) accredited?

[Jen Kirley]

A new blog post is up in Conway Business Services web site, involving the apparently flourishing industry of unaccredited ISO certification service providers.

 

[Sidney Vianna]

Jen, what makes you think this practice is flourishing? As an SQE, are you seeing it more in your supplier base? Without education of the procurement arms of large corporations, it is hard for buyers to properly specify the certification requirements of their supplier base.

 

[Howard Atkins]

I am seeing it as an auditor more and more "bogus accredited" certificates

 

[Jen Kirley]

I don't have historical numbers to compare within the supplier control field, but over time I am seeing the list of "accredited" CBs growing in AIAO-Bar, including within the U.S.

I agree more education is needed. I did my part while auditing, one client at a time. They had no idea.

 

[Sidney Vianna]

Interesting to know that, Howard. The coalition of the willing also known as the IAF seems not to be able to fight back the unaccredited, pseudo accredited and bogus accredited competition. But, and in part, this is also a result of accredited CB's shooting themselves in the foot, like, for example, when I detected and denounced, almost 15 years ago, a competitor CB, dully and fully accredited, issuing unaccredited certificates to circumvent accreditation requirements. That scenario was captured in the Accredited registrars issuing non accredited certificates thread.

Also, remember, if we had a functional, effective database of (properly) accredited certificates, like the best-in-class OASIS database, it would be much easier for bogus certificates to be spotted. But, even the creation of such database has been resisted by many in the CB community, failing to have the vision and business acumen they should have, in order to make their business prosper. Shameful.

As usual, the accreditation layer of oversight with their typical slowness of a lazy bureaucrat who feels not being paid enough to do his job, finally reacted and in 2015 issued a resolution against the practice, which was captured and codified by ANAB in it's Accreditation Rule 42.

So, something that I brought up in 2005 here became an issue of an Accreditation Rule (in the USA) in 2017. I have no idea if the other IAF member AB's have issued similar rules or not. As you can see, even (some) CB's worked against the credibility of the accreditation process and the IAF seems not to have the reaction speed it needs to counteract the threats to it's existence. Risk. Based. Not thinking.

​

 

[Howard Atkins]

Sidney
I once found a certificate from your CB with no accreditation on it.
I brought it to their attention and received an excuse.
This was from an "associated CB?"

 

[Sidney Vianna]

Sidney
I once found a certificate from your CB with no accreditation on it.

To what standard?

 

[Howard Atkins]

To what standard?

ISO 9001
I included you on a mail 31 December 2006 about this when I contacted the office

 

[Sidney Vianna]

I don’t remember it, but let me be clear: it is wrong for accredited registrars to issue non-accredited certificates. So much so that the IAF passed the resolution above.

 

[Sidney Vianna]

A new blog post is up in Conway Business Services web site, involving the apparently flourishing industry of unaccredited ISO certification service providers.

In addition to the unaccredited, pseudo-accredited, alternatively-accredited, the "properly" accredited CB's now have to deal with the "IAF-umbrella-accredited-even-lower-cost" CB's, as indicated in the Interesting Topic - The proliferation of Accreditation Bodies in the USA thread.

No wonder the data from the ISO Survey shows stagnation or decline for ISO 9001 certification in most of the developed economies. And some people have a hard time understanding why that happens. The 2018 Edition of the ISO Survey should be coming out soon. Let's see what it shows. Meanwhile, the IAF Certsearch database is unavailable, after their botched release a couple of months ago.

The downward spiral of commoditization and trivialization keeps going and, I suspect, at an accelerated pace.