What is ISO Certification?
ISO stands for International Organization for Standardization. ISO Registration or Certification is a process of evaluation and certification to prove competence in the quality management system and that the organization is capable to deliver its products/services as per customers’ requirements. This procedure can be conducted under the following two options.
ISO Certification is issued by the Certification Body. It means that the organization is verified against the ISO standard for its implementation and certified according to the standard by a third-party independent body called Certification Body (CB). The name of CB that issues this certificate should be mentioned on your product. It indicates that the product has passed the test by accredited CB against an ISO standard. Each certificate covers the Organization name, the applicable standard, scope of certification, and period of validity.
ISO Certification is issued by the Registration Body. It implies that the CB’s assessment of ISO standard implementation has not been made, but the organization itself declares its conformity to an ISO standard and issues its own certificate. This certificate may be used internally within the organization for communication, cost reduction, customer satisfaction, etc., however it cannot be used as proof of products conformity to the relevant ISO standard.
How to check the validity of ISO Certification?
Nowadays, all certificate authorities (CB) maintain a repository of all the certificates they have issued. You can view these online on their websites. Similarly, some Accreditation bodies do maintain the details of the ISO Certificates issued by the certification body accredited by them.
A certificate issued by any CB can be verified by the following methods:
- Check the “certificate search option” of the CB which issued the ISO Certificate.
- Check the Accreditation body website’s “Certificate search” option.
When you are on the certificate search options page, apply the certificate number is the field given exactly as printed in the certificate to search for it.
You can check validity as well as find out in which country the certificate has been issued by visiting the CB website and click on the “Search Certificate” option.
If your certificate number entry is correct, then you will get the following information about the ISO Certificate that you searched for.
- A copy of the downloadable certifiate.
- Certificate details such as Name of the Organization, Address and Site details, Scope of Certification as certificate number, code and date of certification, Next audit due, status, etc.,
How to infer the difference:
Any difference in the certificate number, CB name, or any other information mentioned in the certificate indicates that your certificate is either fake or issued by an unaccredited CB.
Certificate Status: Generally certificate status will be “Active”. If the Status is shown as “Suspended” or “withdrawn” means the organization did not complete the surveillance audits successfully.
The difference in Scope: If the certificate scope is different, then CB would have revised the scope. Scope includes the “Scope statement” and the “Sites”.
Most of the cases, if an organization is maintaining multiple sites, if all the site address is not shown in the certificate means that site is not included in the Audit and that process is not fully covered in the system.
Standard’s Version: In some cases, the ISO standard gets revised, but the organization management system might not be updated and certified to the latest version. Even though there is a transition period, check the ‘transition period’ is still valid.
Certificate number difference: A difference will mean that the certificates are different and this might be due to a technical error on the part of the website or search engine. If you find out such error, check again with the certificate authority website. If you find out that the same ISO certificate is issued more than once, search for it again using a different name or abbreviation.
Certificate issuance date difference: Even if there is no error, CB’s may have to revise and re-issue the certificates due to change in information and other reasons. This may result in different dates of validity or re-issuance on the certificate, which is absolutely regular and acceptable.
Website address difference: Again, this might be due to a technical error on their part. Some CB’s change their website addresses and therefore the links given in the certificate are broken. In such a case, you can visit the above-mentioned CB website and search for the certificate or contact them directly.
The certificate is issued by an organization in a different country: This may be due to misprinting on the certificates, but it may also be possible that your organization outsources its product manufacturing to a factory outside of your country. If you are not sure about this, check with the issuing CB.
The website address available on the certificate is not operational: Your certificate may be expired and therefore it may have been removed from the site, or you may have entered an incorrect link for searching your ISO Certification. Check again with the certificate authority website or contact them directly.
If you still haven’t got any positive information after all the above-said verification steps, then your ISO Certification may be fake.
If you are not sure about the validity of a specific certificate, contact us to verify it for free and we will let you know whether or not is it in order. You can also click here for a list of accredited CB’s which can help you in verifying ISO certificates online.