The editors at Quality Digest can breathe a disingenuous sigh of relief because the IAF has announced it is making participation in its CertSearch database mandatory. You see, QD has been lying for years that CertSearch was already mandatory, and refused to run a correction or retraction. Now, they can say their “reporting” was accurate, even if it comes after the fact.
That’s not how reporting works, but Quality Digest is a dingy den of racist shitheads, so whatever.
Anyway, back to the subject at hand, the IAF has published “Mandatory Document” MD 28 which claims to make it a requirement for membership for accreditation bodies (ABs) to upload their information into CertSearch, and likewise force each AB’s certification bodies (CBs) to do likewise. On paper, it all sounds very official, very orderly, and very “mandatory.” Says the IAF press release:
Further to IAF Member agreement to mandate the uploading of certificates to IAF CertSearch, IAF has published the new document IAF MD 28, ‘IAF Mandatory Document for the Upload and Maintenance of Data on IAF Database’. This document outlines the mandatory requirements for accreditation bodies and certification bodies to achieve the IAF Database Principles, provides guidance as to how accreditation bodies and certification bodies will conform with those requirements, and outlines sanctions for nonconformity with the requirements of this document.
Sounds pretty cut-and-dry, right?
Except remember this is the corrupt organization that issued a mandate to stop all accreditation activities in Russia, only to have its own Chair, Emanuele Riva, ignore his own mandate and continue to sell accreditations in that country, in violation of international sanctions. If the IAF doesn’t care about international law, do you really think they are going to suddenly care about enforcing their “mandatory documents“?
The answer is, of course, no. They have refused to enforce requirements on audit duration and certification body behavior, all of which are codified in existing MDs. They have refused to update other MDs that reference obsolete documents, allowing accreditation bodies to “rubber-stamp” accreditations around the world without ever going through IAF “mandated” peer evaluations.
So, no, MD28 won’t get enforced either. And the authors added a poison pill to ensure it doesn’t.
Buried in the text are allowances for ABs and CBs to skip out of complying with MD28 entirely, based on the vaguest of suggestions. Nearly three pages of the 20-page document (counting the cover and table of contents) are dedicated to “Justifications for Exclusion,” so they spent a lot of time figuring out how IAF members could ignore the entire document, rather than comply with it.
For both ABs and CBs, IAF says they can ignore the rules simply if there is an “absence of mandate to do so (if government agency).”
Now I have no idea what the hell that means, so if you don’t, you’re not alone. Reading it literally, it means that participation in IAF CertSearch would require a government mandate to participate in IAF Certsearch, above and beyond MD28 itself, for those ABs that are also government agencies. Which, by the way, is almost every AB.
So you don’t have to participate in CertSearch unless your government tells you that you have to. And, let’s face it, how many governments are going to go through the process of generating a rule or law dictating participation in CertSearch, which they probably never heard of? It’s nearly zero.
For CB’s, the IAF gives them even more leeway. In addition to the language saying they can ignore the mandate if there is an “absence of mandate to do so (if government agency),” IAF adds a note that appears to totally muddy the waters further:
Note: Where a CB is a governmental agency and their government mandate prevents the CB from participating in the IAF Database.
So the sentence says the CB doesn’t have to comply if there is an absence of a mandate, and then the note says they don’t have to comply if there is the presence of a mandate.
Huh?
If you think IAF’s Elva Nilsen is on crack cocaine, you’re not alone. Nobody is editing these things. (And, yes, they go out with her name on it. Sniff sniff snort.)
So at the end of the day, the IAF once again published a lot of words that will give misreporting like that done by Quality Digest some cover, and will allow them to claim — falsely — that “IAF CertSearch is mandatory,” when in actual practice, it is anything but.
Do you think China is really going to force its ABs and CBs to participate, given that the bulk of their alleged ISO certifiates are fake? Of course not.
Can a man get an ultra vires lawyer up in this joint? It’s the only way to stop this mafia racket.
You can grab “Mandatory” Document MD28 here.
Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 35 years’ experience implementing ISO 9001 and AS9100 systems, and helps establish certification and accreditation bodies with the ISO 17000 series. He is a vocal advocate for the development and use of standards from the point of view of actual users. He is the writer and artist of THE AUDITOR comic strip, and is currently writing the DR. CUBA pulp novel series. Visit www.drcuba.world
