The International Accreditation Forum (IAF) has pulled its “COVID FAQ” without any announcement to the public and without formal notice to its members or the ISO accreditation scheme.
The FAQ defined a handful of timelines and rule changes to accommodate the performance of audits during the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, the IAF held off creating any special rules during the outbreak and allowed auditors to continue performing in-person audits long after the world’s governments implemented social distancing and other controls. The IAF did move to protect its members, however, working with ISO CASCO to implement special rules that transitioned all IAF peer evaluations of accreditation bodies (ABs) to remote-only audits.
In mid-2020, the IAF relented and published a handful of rules that allowed companies to implement a “no visitor’s policy” and other measures to ensure ISO 9001 and other audits could be performed during the pandemic.
According to the updated FAQ page, the IAF’s removal of those policies is “due to the end of the crisis period and all referenced dates having passed.”
Despite the threat of new pandemics, such as bird flu and monkeypox, the IAF has not permanently changed its policies for certification audits. The diluted rules for AB peer evaluations, however, were not lifted, raising concern of the further weakening of Ab oversight by IAF.