The bold experiment
IRCA director Simon Feary comments on RABQSA’s suspension of the deadline for its new auditor certification programme
Over on our side of the pond there’s little surprise at RABQSA's decision to suspend the deadline on its new auditor certification programme. The reaction coming from auditors and registrars in North America has been very negative, much more than the usual.
Another indicator has been the numbers of RABQSA auditors requesting a transfer of their auditor certification to the International Register of Certificated Auditors (IRCA) programmes. There’s always been a few each month but over the last six months or so the trickle has increased very significantly. It’s clear they are not happy.
Trying to get the market interested in a radically different approach is always going to be a tough sell, especially so if that new approach also involves a hefty increase in costs. If there’s little in the way of additional perceived value attached to those extra costs then it’s not difficult to predict the outcome.
My understanding of the RABQSA approach was that it had its roots in the premise that incompetent auditors were the primary cause behind business and industry’s loss of confidence in certification. But I’ve never accepted the logic of that argument. And even the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) is beginning at last to accept now that the root cause is less to do with incompetent auditors, and more to do with incompetent audit –yes, there is a difference. Incompetent audit is primarily a consequence of ineffective accreditation, and resolving that is not within the remit of RABQSA, IRCA or any of the other auditor certification bodies.
I’ve no doubt RABQSA’s motives about improving auditor competence were well intended, but suspect all they served to do was irritate the thousands of competent certified auditors who took exception to being told they weren’t in fact competent because they hadn’t acquired their certification through this new, expensive route.
IRCA’s approach to accreditation and ISO/IEC 17024 is different. We are taking care to understand what the users want and then to accommodate that within the accreditation bodies’ interpretation of 17024.
We are taking our time, as we want to get this right. We don’t want the accreditation label if it means offering something that users don’t want, or auditors can’t easily do, or if it involves unacceptable costs. Trying to pull the certification market in a direction that not all parts of the supply infrastructure want to go is high risk. The auditor certification industry on its own won’t solve the audit competence issue. To achieve a real change will require the active participation of the registrars and the accreditation bodies. And promisingly, there are signs that this may happen.
The International Personnel Certification Association (IPC) has set accreditation to 17024 as their membership entry level and I don’t anticipate they will see a need to review this because of what happened to RABQSA’s programme. IPC, and indeed 17024 is intended for a much wider audience than for auditor certification bodies who certify management systems auditors.
The competency based approach will, and in fact is, working readily in some sectors, but not in others. RABQSA’s experience might suggest that management systems certification may be amongst the latter.
Right now, on an international scale, accreditation to 17024 is a mess. There is little consistency in implementation between accreditation bodies, and a practice that one accreditation body might readily allow, another might find completely unacceptable. This makes accreditation to 17024 something of a lottery and, until this is resolved, it remains fairly meaningless other than as a basic indication that the auditor certification body operates a coherent management system.
On the one hand, I have to commend Michael and RABQSA for the boldness of their approach. But on the other, I regret that through their uncompromising rhetoric over auditor competence they have distracted attention from what I see as the real issue behind industries growing lack of interest in accredited certification, which is ineffective accreditation.