Nepal is working hard to dig out from under a flood of corruption and scandals within the accredited ISO certification scheme, much of which is reported to be due to the influence of India, with whom Nepal shares a border.<\/p>\n
Until recently, Nepal did not have a national accreditation body. Now, however, the Nepal Accreditation Foundation has formed and applied for full IAF membership through the regional body APAC, so things may change. But this lack of an in-country entity in Nepal allowed India to essentially export its corrupt practices into the country, setting it back decades. Then, non-Indian entities began mimicking the Indian practices, ensuring globalization of the corruption.<\/p>\n
In a flurry of activity over the past few weeks, some whistleblowers in Nepal \u2014 coming from the certification scheme world itself, mind you \u2014 show the country fighting back.<\/p>\n
URS Nepal Scandal<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n One complaint was filed against the huge UK-based certification body URS, which operates as “URS Nepal” in Kathmandu. URS has proven to be one of the most corrupt certification bodies currently operating in the allegedly “legitimate<\/em>” circle, and holds full UKAS accreditation.<\/p>\n Previously, URS continued to operate in Russia<\/a>, ignoring international sanctions and an IAF mandate to stop. In a separate case, URS certified an Indian pharmaceutical company that was selling illegal, fake COVID cures<\/a>, and then refused to withdraw the cert after they were provided evidence. Oxebridge worked with the US FDA and the Indian FDA to pull the products from the market, but URS would have let people die.<\/p>\n The new Nepal complaint alleges that the URS Nepal office isn’t even accredited, citing the official UKAS accreditation certificate that does not list Nepal at all in the CB’s list of sites.<\/p>\n The IAF has ignored complaints like these, leading to a “rubber-stamp accreditation” problem<\/a> whereby a single person in an office in India can immediately claim accreditation in over 190 countries simultaneously. The IAF had rules against this, but stopped updating the rules and, later, stopped enforcing them.<\/p>\n As a result, it is unlikely that UKAS or IAF will do anything about the URS Nepal scandal.<\/p>\n G-CERTI Nepal Scandal<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n A separate complaint raises allegations against G-CERTI, a CB with at least one main office in South Korea, which operates a Nepal branch called G. Certi Nepal Pvt. Ltd.<\/p>\n G-CERTI is accredited by IAS and KAB, two notorious accreditation mills that, nevertheless, hold full IAF membership. The complaint alleges that the Nepal office performs key activities as a CB, but is not listed as a key site on the IAS scope of accreditation for G-CERTI.<\/p>\n The complaint then points out that G-CERTI lists “Globus Certification Nepal Pvt. Ltd.<\/em>” as one of its “franchisees<\/em>.” That CB is a notorious, unaccredited certificate mill.<\/p>\n In response to this complaint, G-CERTI insisted that Globus is no longer in operation, even though they have a current — and live — website<\/a>. The practice of falsely claiming a related office is “not in business”<\/em> is common among scammers<\/a>, and the accreditation bodies rarely check.<\/p>\n G-CERTI representative Kilyoung Seong<\/a> just denied the complaint’s claims without providing any evidence, and then accused the whistleblower of being a competitor engaged in “malicious disparagement that does not align with the facts<\/em>.” That, in itself, is a violation of ISO 17021-1, which requires that CBs be open to complaints and process them with objectivity and impartiality.<\/p>\n G-CERTI only took a few hours to respond to the complaint and provided no evidence of any robust investigation or corrective action.<\/p>\n Again, it is unlikely that IAS or IAF will do anything about the scandal, and G-CERTI will be allowed to continue to operate unimpeded.<\/p>\n Carbon Credits Scandal<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Oxebridge will have a more in-depth report on this issue soon, but the Governance & Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence<\/a> (GI ACE) program, managed by the UK-based\u00a0Center for the Study of Corruption<\/a>, has issued a\u00a0damning report<\/a> on corruption in the Indian carbon market.<\/span><\/p>\n The report calls out major, accredited CBs like TUV SUD, RINA Services, and KBS Certification Services, for fraud, saying each is “remunerated by the very project developers whose environmental claims they are legally mandated to scrutinize<\/em>.” The report claims, “the Indian carbon market has evolved into a highly optimized nexus for sophisticated methodologies of environmental fraud<\/em>.”<\/p>\n Related to Nepal, the GI ACE report claims:<\/p>\n RINA Services S.p.A., an Italian multinational engineering and certification firm with significant, highly active operational offices in India, presents a compelling case study of geographic arbitrage. RINA frequently utilizes its Indian operational base to audit complex projects in less regulated or more logistically challenging jurisdictions, such as Nepal and Bangladesh.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It then accuses the CBs in Nepal of doing “desk-only audits<\/em>” and evading “field reality.<\/em>”<\/p>\n Whistleblowers in Nepal are attempting to battle this corruption by ensuring the related certification bodies face penalties for their fraud, but to date have had little success. A large-scale investigation is underway.<\/p>\n Neither the IAF (now rebranded as Global ACI) nor APAC has weighed in on any of the scandals, and both seem content to allow them to continue.<\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nepal is trying to fight back against corruption, even as oversight bodies ignore it.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":644,"featured_media":33758,"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":[3],"tags":[24,1919,8853,8846,83,486,43,8828,8854,396,165,2291,2290],"class_list":["post-33753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-accreditation","tag-apac","tag-carbon-credits","tag-global-aci","tag-iaf","tag-ias","tag-iso","tag-nepal","tag-rina-services","tag-tuv-sud","tag-ukas","tag-united-registrar-of-systems","tag-urs","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\/33753","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\/644"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33753"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33759,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33753\/revisions\/33759"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oxebridge.com\/emma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}