Japanese guidance for third-party
certification

In September 2008, the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) issued guidelines to help ensure the reliability of the certification system for management system standards. Responding to this, led by Japanese accreditation bodies, a number of working groups were convened and spent the majority of 2009 investigating issues related to the downward spiral in reliability of management systems certification.

Working group WG4 focused on competence and has now issued guidance for effectiveness auditing which aims to ensure:

• assessment over the competence of certification bodies’ effectiveness auditing to ensure the improvement of certified organizations’ performance
• Japanese accreditation bodies promote effectiveness auditing through accreditation assessment and certification auditing
• certification bodies understand effectiveness auditing properly and develop auditing methods as required, as well as promote a proper understanding of effectiveness auditing to certified organizations
• both accreditation bodies and certification bodies share the same understanding of effectiveness auditing and are prepared to execute the duties of each party.

The WG4 guidance can be found on the METI website.