What happens to certifications if the issuing certification body loses accreditation?

Mark Meer

Trusted Information Resource
If a certification body either:
  • Loses accreditation, or
  • Disappears / becomes unreachable
What happens to all the downstream organization that have certificates issued by them, and further downstream of the organizations that use these certificates as part of supplier evaluations?

Specific Case:
Awhile back, we requested a 9001 quality system certificate from one of our suppliers as part of our supplier evaluation/approval process.
They gave us one issued by "beijing zhonglian tianrun certification center (ZLTR)".

I could swear that, at the time, I checked into (insofar as possible) the legitimacy of the certificate and all checked out.
Now, however, I can no longer reach the certification body's website, and despite Google searches pointing to SCC accreditation pages citing ZLTR, the actual SCC accredited list doesn't list them (were they removed? If so, I presume the Google search is just showing cached results?).

In anycase, you can see from a Google search that there are a lot of companies that have certificates issued by ZLTR. If something has happened to ZLTR, what are the downstream effects? How is the industry supposed to respond? How do you monitor this type of thing? Is there anyway to know what happened to ZLTR?
 

Sidney Vianna

Post Responsibly
Leader
Admin
Obviously, the primary interested party here are the certified organizations. Have you contacted your supplier that was certified by this CB? Maybe the CB was acquired/merged and communicated with their customers. The certificates I see online for the CB also had SCC (Canada) Accreditation. In the SCC website, I see no mention to this CB.
The IAF Certsearch database returns NOTHING on this CB, but they only have 1019 CB's listed....:lmao:
 

Mark Meer

Trusted Information Resource
...Have you contacted your supplier that was certified by this CB? Maybe the CB was acquired/merged and communicated with their customers. The certificates I see online for the CB also had SCC (Canada) Accreditation. In the SCC website, I see no mention to this CB....:lmao:

No, I just noticed it now while reviewing our supplier records. Purely coincidence, as normally I won't go so far as to recheck the certification body again. I'll shoot off an email to the supplier...

Regarding their SCC: like I say, a Google search turns up some (presumably cached) SCC accreditation pages with ZLTR in the text, however on the actual SCC site, there is no mention ....which leads me to believe they were once legitimately accredited, but are no longer (for whatever reason). It's too bad the SCC and IAF don't have a history list, so you can browse organizations that were once accredited, but are no longer.

Be a shame if true, as the supplier's certificate doesn't expire until 2022. If I were them and my CB just suddenly disappeared and had its accreditations revoked, I'd be pretty pissed. ..but like you say, maybe there's another explanation....
 
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