INDEPENDENCE • IMPARTIALITY • INTEGRITY

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Principle

Impartiality

An accreditation decision is useful only if a reader can rely on it having been reached without favor. Impartiality is the set of arrangements that make that reliance reasonable.

What impartiality requires

Impartiality is the presence of objectivity. It asks whether the people and the structure involved can act without preference for a particular outcome. A declaration of good intention is part of the culture of the work. It is not a sufficient control.

For an accreditation body, the relevant risks include consultancy or other services to the body being assessed, financial dependence that could press on a decision, personal relationships, and related bodies whose commercial interest lies in a favorable result. The same classes of risk arise inside certification and inspection bodies, which is why those standards treat impartiality as a requirement of the body itself.

Safeguards that are ordinarily expected

  • A published commitment to impartiality, once a policy has been approved.
  • Identification of risks, including those that arise from related bodies.
  • Declaration and recording of conflicts by people who assess or decide.
  • Removal of a person from a case they cannot treat objectively.
  • A decision taken separately from the assessment of that case.
  • Oversight of the arrangements by people who can challenge them.
  • A route for a complaint where a person believes impartiality has failed.

What is published today

The principle is stated. The policy that would assign responsibilities, define related bodies and record the review of risks is a placeholder in the document center. No diagram of AKZERT’s structure is shown, because the structure has not been verified for publication.

A concern about impartiality can be raised through the contact form, choosing the category Complaint. The form will say whether the message can be delivered. Raising a concern on an unconfigured form does not open a case file.

Questions

Is impartiality the same as independence?

Independence describes freedom from direction and from interests that would command the result. Impartiality describes objectivity in the matter itself. The two support each other. A body can be legally separate and still partial, if the people who decide have an interest in the outcome.

Does AKZERT provide consultancy to bodies it might assess?

This site does not offer consultancy, and it does not describe any consultancy practice. A future impartiality policy would have to deal explicitly with any service that could compromise a later decision. No such service is advertised here.