Colombia. From now on, the Colombian industry will be able to trade Colombian goods and services internationally without having to resort to the services of conformity assessors abroad to demonstrate their compliance with technical standards in product certification, management systems and laboratory results, since conformity assessment in the country is internationally recognized through the distinction received by ONAC as an organization. accreditor counterpart of the others of the world.
International recognition agreements constitute an important strategic advantage for the national industry and therefore translate into multiple opportunities for the growth of productive and commercial activity in the country, eliminating technical barriers to trade and avoiding the duplication of certificates that until now appeared as a necessity for national exporters.
The National Accreditation Body of Colombia, designated by the National Government to exercise the functions as the only accrediting body of the Country, received multilateral recognition -MLA- for the accreditation of product certification bodies and for that of certification bodies of management systems, by the Inter-American Accreditation Cooperation -IAAC-, during the 20th General Assembly of members of this organization, held in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
This important achievement for the National Quality Subsystem is in addition to the international recognition of the accreditation of testing and calibration laboratories, received in March 2014 and ratified in September of this year, with which the results of laboratories accredited in the respective scope by ONAC must be accepted in more than 80 economies around the world, and, from now on, management system and product certificates must be recognized in more than 56 countries; thus reducing the costs of international transactions and adding value to goods and services through the trust generated by accreditation in the markets to ensure their quality and the protection of consumer rights, the environment, health and life.
With the recognition of accreditation for the certification of product, processes and services under the ISO/IEC 17065 standard and for its sub-scopes in the certification of food safety management systems, under the ISO 22000 standard; information security management, under ISO/IEC 27001; quality management, under ISO 9001; and environmental management, under ISO 14001; that for all cases are covered by the ISO/IEC 17021 standard, Colombia becomes, as of September 2015, the country with the highest number of scopes recognized by IAAC in America, and the first country in the world to be internationally recognized to grant accreditation with scope in the ISO 22000 and ISO/IEC 27001 standards.
