For two decades now, or more, we have become accustomed to the concept of organisations being “certified” to one management system or another (e.g. ISO 9001). Now the time has come for an international standard to govern those companies that carry out the certification!

ISO/IEC 17021:2006, Conformity assessment – Requirements for bodies providing audit and certification of management systems, places rigorous requirements for competence and impartiality on the bodies that offer audit and certification to standards like ISO 9001:2000 (quality management) and ISO 14001:2004 (environmental management). It provides the option for a certification body to have a quality management system based on ISO 9001:2000 and to have conformity verified by accreditation bodies.

Just before Christmas, ISO reported that the IAF had set 15 September 2008 as the deadline for compliance, two years after the publication of “17021”, for the following reasons:

• Migrating to the new requirements may require translations, changes to procedures, contracts, committees and other arrangements, all of which take time.

• Certification bodies will also need time to identify changes needed to their own quality management systems to conform to the new requirements and to prepare and implement transition plans.

ISO/IEC 17021:2006 replaces and improves on two separate documents, ISO/IEC Guide 62:1996 and ISO/IEC Guide 66:1996, which respectively gave the requirements for certification bodies practising quality and environmental management system certification.

News & Views Archives

You are viewing the text version of this site.

To view the full version please install the Adobe Flash Player and ensure your web browser has JavaScript enabled.

Need help? check the requirements page.