Background: There is a global company comprised of many separate legal entities worldwide. The owner of the accreditation is one of the legal entities and based in Norway. The accredited legal entity in it own country does not have competence in-house for a certain directive.
Question: Can this accredited certification body outsource or use external personnel for the certification process? (Accepting and review of the application, all evaluation activity, review and certification decision)
March 2019
As the case is described “a global company comprised of many separate legal entities worldwide”, it seems that it refers to multi-site CB and cross-frontier activity and not to subcontracting.
The answer is then yes, provided that requirements of EA-2/13 are fulfilled, especially “the registered legal entity – the owner of accreditation – shall have the full operational control and appropriate competence and resources to assure control over the full scope of accreditation.”
By the way, this case does not appear to be specific to NBs nor to ISO/IEC 17065 but applicable to all accredited CABs.