To maintain the confidence in our conformity assessment service, we shall ensure impartiality and no conflict of interest throughout our certification process.
We strive to prevent situations where a risk to impartiality or a conflict of interest arises. A conflict of interest occurs when an individual or organization has multiple interests, one of which could possibly compromise the credibility of a given activity.
VCC&C has additional policies related to impartiality management such as Anti-Corruption policy, which are available in our website.
VCC&C structure and policies have been designed to mitigate potential or avoid actual conflicts of interest, at both individual and organizational levels.
The principles with respect to the impartiality are as follows:
- Identify, analyze and mitigate risks to impartiality on an ongoing basis;
- Have commitments to impartiality and no conflict of interest of all certification-related personnel by signing the Code of conduct of VCC&C and completing Relation Diclosure Form. Such information is used for analysis of related risks and determination of appropriate mitigation actions;
- We do not provide services of consultancy, pre-assessment and training for certification, that accentuate the impartiality in our certification activities.
For certification schemes where VCC&C is an accredited certification body we do not: - Recommend specific actions or products for complying with the applicable requirements;
- Give advice or directions, prescribe practices, or provide instructions to close non-conformities.
Since the start of the certification process, we identify risks related to impartiality and no conflict of interest in certification activities by application review and conduct appropriate mitigation actions if needed.
While we may recommend consultancy organizations or consulting companies to support a certification client, we do not state or imply that certification would be simpler, easier, faster or less expensive if a specified consultancy service is used.
We shall not have any agreement or engagement with any consultancy service in which we remunerate the consultant if the consultant recommend a client to VCC&C; or conversely, the consultant pay us for a recommendation of the consultant to the client.
Auditors, certifiers, quality reviewers and any members of Complaint and Appeal Committee shall not be assigned relevant client-related tasks if they worked at or provided consultancy to the client within the previous two years.