National Accreditation Body (AB): Organization

ONE VS. MANY NATIONAL ACCREDITATION BODIES

There is no international agreement that limits the number of NABs in a country. Hence, due to historical developments, more than one accreditation body was established in some countries. There is however a price to pay for such fragmentation. For example, recognition at the international level has to be sought for each of the accreditation bodies, and overlaps and gaps can create confusion, for instance about which body represents the country at the international level. The trend therefore has been to merge the multiple accreditation bodies into one national body as has been the case recently in a number of European countries such as Germany and Italy.

STAND-ALONE VS. COMBINED DELIVERY OF SERVICES

Another issue that needs to be considered is whether the NAB will be established as an independent, stand-alone organisation, or whether it can be combined successfully with another in the QI. Combinations are possible, and have been successfully practiced in a small number of countries. For example, accreditation and standards have been successfully combined in SCC (Canada), DSM (Malaysia), CYS (Cyprus) and BSN (Indonesia). A caveat is that such organisations can under no circumstances provide conformity assessment services; this would be a clear conflict of interest.

GOVERNANCE STRUCTURE

ISO/IEC 17011 specifies the governance structures of an NAB to a large extent. Over and above the Council or Board of Directors, various groups that represent clients have to be established as well as technical committees for each sector to provide the NAB with advice on the accreditation decisions regarding companies that were assessed.