(IRCA: London) -- IRCA and RABQSA today announced a change to the Bilateral Agreement on the mutual acceptance of training courses and examinations for auditor certification.

The IRCA-RABQSA agreement has been in place since 2006 based on the equivalence of outcome of each organization’s training and examination processes for business management systems auditors. During that period the approach by each organization has developed such that they are no longer able to establish equivalence of outcome in all schemes, and this is now reflected in the changed scope of mutual recognition.

RABQSA will continue to accept certificates of successful completion from IRCA-certified courses as before. However, the scope of the new BLA will mean that:
• IRCA will no longer accept certificates of successful completion from RABQSA TPECS assessments dated after July 1, 2012.
• IRCA will limit acceptance of RABQSA Training Course Certification and will only accept certificates of successful completion of RABQSA Internal QMS Auditor training course as equivalent to the IRCA Internal QMS Auditor and IRCA QMS Foundation courses (i.e., meeting the training requirement for IRCA certification as an internal auditor) dated from July 1, 2012.

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