What is an Accredited Certification Body?

Under the Scheme for the Accreditation Certification Bodies (ACB), Accredited Certification Body refers to the bodies that provide conformity certificates to organizations for their various management systems (eg. ISO 9001, ISO 22000, etc), individual and product.

Accredited means the recognized certification bodies by the International Accredited Forum (IAF)’s Accreditation Body that demonstrate to the industry that they are technically capable of auditing and certifying activity in compliance with national and international standards and regulations.

The accredited certification bodies are required to be ISO 17021:2015 certified, which involves principles and requirements for bodies offering audit and certification of all types of management systems in terms of competence, consistency, and fairness. This standard of requirements was developed by ISO Committee on conformity assessment (CASCO) in 2006, to facilitate the recognition of certification bodies.

How to choose a Certification Body?

When choosing a Certification Body, the key elements that a company shall evaluate are:

Accreditation – A company that required an ISO Certification is advised to choose a accredited certification body that achieved an ISO 17021:2015 certification, which represents the safest approach to ensure that your certificate will be universally recognized.
Compliance with ISO’s Committee on Conformity Assessment (CASCO) – A company must ensure that a certification body does follow the policy standards developed by CASCO, to perform conformity assessment activities.
Specialization – Each certification body has a field of expertise in different industries and your company must ensure that the certification body’s field of competence corresponds to your requirements.
Auditor’s availability – Different certification bodies could have different timeframes for the auditors to conduct an audit. For example, the larger the certification body is, the longer you need to wait for an external audit. Therefore, a company needs to be aware of scheduling the strategic goals with deciding the timeframe to become certified, and the maturity of the management system of a certification body.
Language – The audit will go much more smoothly if the auditor could speak your language else translator will be required. In addition, it will be able to create a better relationship with the auditor, and he/she can read your documents much more quickly if there is no language barrier.

List of Certification Bodies

British Standard Institution (BSI Group)
Bureau Veritas (BV)
Pearl Certification
Lloyd’s Register Group Limited (LR)
General Society of Surveillance (SGS S.A) French: Société Générale de Surveillance
Technical Inspection Association (TUV-SUD) German: Technischer Überwachungsverein

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