Unlike first and second party audits, where auditors are not independent, the third party audit is objective. It is an assessment of an organization’s environmental system conducted by an independent, outside auditor or team of auditors. When referring to a third party audit as it applies to an international environmental standard such as ISO 14001, the term “third party” is synonymous with an environmental system registrar whose primary responsibility is to assess your organization’s environmental system for conformance to that standard and issue a certificate of conformance upon completion of a successful assessment.

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Conformity Assessment as part of Third Party Audits

A conformity assessment as applicable to environmental management can be defined as “the determination of whether a product or process conforms to particular standards or specifications”. For a long time, independent third parties have played a significant role in different sectors of the economy. A conformity assessment includes a wide range of approaches. Approaches applicable to sampling, testing, inspecting, evaluating, verifying, and assuring conformity are of importance here. Conformity assessment also applies to the certification of quality system assessment and registration, which includes various combinations of these procedures.

The Importance of Conformity Assessment

A conformity assessment system needs to be in place in all audit systems. This is necessary to ensure that audit, inspection, certification, registration, accreditation, and workplace compliance inspection systems work. This applies to all systems that are in place and working. This should also be the case for all proposed systems.

Features of a Conformity Assessment Structure include:

• A standard against which assessments should are made;
• An agreed upon measurement method; thus a way to perform the assessment;
• A strong accreditation mechanism whereby accreditation parties (first, second, third) are certified to perform assessments; and
• A means where affected parties can register complaints – a QA/QC mechanism whereby assessor performance undergoes evaluation and modification as needed.