Would it be possible to harmonise the concept of accreditation cycle for the purpose of equivalent application of the requirements for NAB’s in IAF MD17 (and others such as MD16, etc.).
MD17 requires NAB’s to determine the number of witness audits per accreditation cycle. For the purposes of harmonization, could we state that this should be read as the number of witness audits per 4 years and that if NAB’s have an accreditation cycle of 5 years, that the number of witness audits in the cycle should be 20% higher. The discrepancy between the cycle lengths would negate part of the harmonization efforts that are intended by this IAF MD.
March 2018
This question was put to the IAF Technical Committee in Frankfurt in March 2018, IAF MD17 was subsequently updated and is in draft form.
The draft introduced a standard first period of 5 years of accreditation for witnessing irrespective of the accreditation cycle, this was subsequently agreed at the IAF TC.
But the CB shall evaluate this demonstration and the real scope of the organization before deciding it can or not reduce audit time; This could be an output of stage I.