Interesting Discussion The IAF is concerned with Ethics and Accountability of Accreditation Bodies

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Sidney Vianna

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Ethical and Professional Responsibility in Accreditation

Objective accountability is a fundamental principle in ensuring that accredited organizations are held responsible for the actions of their inspectors. Ethical violations are not merely individual …
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Things must be getting worse in the IAF coalition. At least this is my read of the “between the lines” in this article. As I have been warning the community here for a long time, when we moved from low-cost certification to low-cost accreditation we regressed tremendously in FAFO credibility debacle. Worth the read. But don’t fool yourselves thinking anything will really change. And I can only imagine all the scandals and ethical breaches they have uncovered before they develop an article such as this. Just perusing the threads here (see couple of examples below) about the IAF, it becomes clear they know they have a bunch of ethical breaches and they have no freaking idea of how to prevent or combat it. Unregulated accreditation leads to this. The market forces eat these people for breakfast.

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Interesting Discussion Thread 'The proliferation of Accreditation Bodies in the USA'

When we go to the IAF website page where they list the different countries where they have signatory accreditation bodies, we can then, drive down in the different countries. Gone are the days of ANAB's monopoly in the USA. As of today, there are 3 accreditation bodies, based in the US granting approvals to registrars all over the World. I just checked to see if this trend was also happening in other countries such as the UK, China and Mexico. Interestingly, in those countries the IAF database only displays a single AB, each.

As I said elsewhere in this forum, the low cost approach...

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Informational Thread 'The dark and dystopian world of the IAF'

Not sure what the IAF is trying to accomplish, but apparently, they are engaged in using fear as a way to justify their existence. Ludicrous. If the IAF "leadership" believes this kind of negative, dark marketing campaign is the proper way to promote itself, they are much more clueless than I thought. An organization that is supposed to be on the top of the management system accreditation food chain should not be as somber as these videos portray. I wonder if organizations such as ANAB, UKAS, RvA and some other global accreditation bodies were consulted before this type of videos were...
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I'm surprised that they published this article - it is a tacit admission of the whole system's failure to address significant ethical issues.

I think he misdiagnoses the problem. There are already rules and a complaint process that should be sufficient to deal with these problems, but the CBs, ABs, and IAF itself often decline to enforce the rules, even for egregious violations (as [he who shall not be named] has publicly documented for decades).

They need to start enforcing the existing rules; creating new rules with no enforcement would be useless (although they could claim they are "doing something" to address the problem, so maybe it helps their PR problem in the short term).
 
For most of the people in “leadership” (they are not true leaders) positions at the IAF, the important thing is to pretend they are doing something. Thus, the endless, useless, meaningless initiatives.

Cowardly oversight. For over 30 years.
 
It is interesting to compare the IAF and ILAC approaches. It seems that ILAC is holding their ABs to a much higher standard than IAF. And there is a lot of overlap in membership...I would love to pick the brains of folks at A2LA or ANAB about the differing approaches.

I live in ISO-17025 world...Where most labs have quantifiable reportables: measurement uncertainty, proficiency testing with En values, traceability requirements that flow down data, even things like BIPM Key Comparisons for national labs. It becomes hard to fudge those over time.

Eventually, a lie sees daylight...Which seems to be what IAF is experiencing. It is a tremendous increase in work, but maybe the time has come for them to seriously consider blind comparisons of audit outputs, occasional full examinations instead of sampling audits, or just flat out booting some of their objectively lower-performing ABs. The end certification customers sure won't like that. Imagine telling some company they are getting audited twice this year, or that their audit is 5 extra days and requires ALL quality records be pulled? Some companies would just drop their 9001 cert.

Or they can continue with the status quo. Personally, the only value I see in 9001 right now is when it is just a stepping stone on the path to a certification/accreditation with some more meat (17025, 9100, 13485, etc.).

Last thought: "accountable manager" seems like a GREAT euphemism for "fall guy". Whatever happened to a root cause generally not being attributable to an individual?

Thanks for sharing Sidney...We live in interesting times.
 
Sidney Vianna said:
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IAF | ILAC | Merging | GAC | Accredited Certification | MLA

International Accreditation Forum and International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation are merging to form Global Accreditation Cooperation Incorporated (GAC)
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Oh geez. Well, it was good while it lasted :( . Hopefully ILAC 'takes over' IAF. Not the other way around. I'm feeling "McDonnell-Douglas buying Boeing with Boeing's" money vibes here...

Will be interesting to see how the affects 17025 labs...And if that accreditation ends up devalued to our end customers.
 
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