TALKING POINT on IBI
Do EA members adhere to their own internal agreement?The members of the European co-operation for Accreditation (EA) form a non-profit association registered in the Netherlands since June 2000, whose secretariat is operating out of Paris.
The 49 members of the EA are the national accreditation bodies based in EU or EFTA countries or in a country that has been officially classified by the EU or EFTA as a potential candidate country or has been classified by the EU as a country or economy of particular importance within the framework of the European Neighbourhood Policy.
Members include not only the countries of the EU, but also some North African and Eastern European countries as well as Albania, Iceland, Montenegro, Norway, North Macedonia, Serbia, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
EA was officially mandated by the European Commission through Regulation (EC) No 765/2008 to develop and maintain a Multilateral Agreement on Mutual Recognition (EA MLA). EA gladly followed the mandate and developed the document EA-1/06, the latest version of which dates back to 2022. In this agreement, the signatories recognised the equivalence of each other’s accreditation systems. This set the goal of “once accredited, accepted everywhere”, which means that a certifier accredited by DAKKS in Germany or NAH in Hungary, for example, is directly recognised as a Conformity Assessment Body by UKAS in the UK or BELAC in Belgium without further ado.
But is the EA living up to this multilateral agreement? In a short word, No.
There are at least two cases where certifiers in our industry are required to obtain separate accreditations in different EA member countries. In addition to the relevant double and substantial accreditation fees, the certifiers also have to spend the relevant processing time during the typical audits, in which no income can be generated. The effort is therefore reflected in higher fees for the industry.