Behind the scenes, ISO is reportedly cooking up a scheme with the new IAF organization, Global ACI, to require third-party certification body (CB) auditors to verify their clients have purchased official copies of ISO standards and have the correct number of licenses.<\/p>\n
How it will work, per the IAF’s fever dream, si that during a typical ISO 9001 or other management system audit, the CB’s auditor will check to confirm you have enough copies of the particular standard based on your employee count, and that all copies are properly licensed. That is usually indicated by an embedded watermark appearing in the standard.<\/p>\n
Typically, companies either buy one copy of an ISO standard or download it from places like Scribd.com and put it on their server. ISO wants to multiply its revenue by ensuring you get a copy for each individual employee who uses it, and that you don’t go to third-party websites to download them.<\/p>\n
There are a lot of problems with this idea, not the least of which is that it’s illegal.<\/p>\n
First, companies pursuing ISO certification to ISO standards are not required to own copies of the standards in the first place. There are alternatives to buying an ISO standard. Users may, for example, buy someone’s book on the subject. They might undergo training and have the training materials on hand. For ISO 9001, they might also use third-party “open source standards<\/em>” that align with the ISO versions, such as Oxebridge Q001<\/strong> in lieu of ISO 9001.<\/p>\n Next, ISO cannot legally “deputize” the employees of other companies to do anything unless they engage in some sticky contract negotiations with each individual CB. And then, the auditors themselves would have to agree to this cockamamie cash grab. ISO has no authority to dictate anything to people who don’t work for them.<\/p>\n Finally, this is illegal theft of service, which is a crime<\/strong> <\/em>under most national legislation. The scenario goes like this: you hire a CB to perform a particular audit. You pay the CB for that audit fee. During the audit time, the auditor is tasked with verifying your conformity against the standard. Time management is everything during ISO audits. Under ISO’s plan, the auditor would be using valuable audit time — that you are paying for — to track down licenses and verify copyrights. Every minute the auditor is working for ISO, instead of the CB, is theft of service.<\/p>\n It’s also illegal to demand that a third party’s employees work for you for free<\/strong><\/em>. There has been no discussion of how ISO will compensate the auditors for their time in this effort.<\/p>\n ISO has no permanent in-house legal counsel since they shitcanned Holger Gehring, after his disastrous attempt to convince ANSI to sue me over a bad review I gave ISO 31000. (That was such a mess, even the Wall Street attorney they used was pushed out of his firm, and the law firm issued an apology. Book reviews are not illegal.)<\/p>\n So, the criminal tendencies of ISO Secretary-General Sergio Mujica, combined with a lack of legal counsel, ensure that ISO will break laws at will.<\/p>\n Now, it appears ISO has slow-walked this plot in recent months, so they might have finally thought better of it and aborted. But I doubt it.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ISO can’t force CB auditors to work for them, much less for free.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24860,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[8846,83,43,14,627],"class_list":["post-33697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-global-aci","tag-iaf","tag-iso","tag-iso-9001","tag-sergio-mujica","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33697"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33698,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33697\/revisions\/33698"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}