ISO/IEC 17020:2026 published: revised requirements for inspection bodies

ISO/IEC 17020 sets requirements for the competence and impartiality of bodies performing inspection. It is the basis of inspection accreditation and is a SEPARATE scope from laboratory (ISO/IEC 17025) or certification (ISO/IEC 17065, 17021-1) accreditation.

The best-known distinction the standard establishes is the division of inspection bodies into types A, B and C by their level of impartiality. The type determines the body's relationship with the party it inspects, and hence which work it can perform.

When an accreditation standard is revised, accredited bodies undergo assessment by the accreditation body within the announced period for moving to the new version. If the transition is not made, the accreditation scope loses its validity.

The burden of the transition is usually not in documentation but in practice: how impartiality risks are managed, how personnel competence is demonstrated, and how inspection records are kept traceable must be shown again.

For an organisation receiving an inspection report, the real question is whether the accreditation scope of the body that issued the report covers that inspection. Accreditation is not a general authority; it is a list written in the scope certificate.

This check becomes even more important during revision periods: the scope of a body in transition can change temporarily. Requesting the current scope certificate before contracting is the simplest safeguard.

This article concerns the standard's scope and transition mechanism; for clause-by-clause differences of the revision and the transition timetable, the accreditation body's announcement should be the reference.

In the world of conformity assessment there are four separate competence regimes, deliberately kept distinct: laboratory, inspection body, product certification body and system certification body. Each does a different job and carries a different impartiality risk.

The job of an inspection body is not to measure but to DECIDE: it decides whether a lifting appliance is fit for use, whether a welded fabrication is acceptable, whether a lift passes its periodic inspection. This decision is mostly made on site, within limited time, and based on the inspector's professional judgement.

Impartiality and competence therefore stand at the core of the standard. When an inspection body is the designer, manufacturer, supplier or maintainer of the object it inspects, its decision is not considered reliable; the standard regulates this relationship by dividing bodies into types.

The standard divides inspection bodies into types by degree of independence. In the most independent type, the body is a third party with no commercial link to the object it inspects. In other types, the body may be part of the organisation owning the object it inspects, but in that case organisational separation and decision independence must be demonstrated to preserve impartiality.

This distinction has direct commercial consequences: if a customer's specification requires "independent third-party inspection", an inspection carried out by an in-house inspection unit does not satisfy it. The accreditation certificate states which type the body is accredited as, and the specification is compared against it.

When an accreditation standard is revised, what the body needs to do is not rebuild the system but a GAP ANALYSIS: it works out, clause by clause, which requirement changed in which direction, whether the existing procedure meets it, and if not, which record needs to be produced.

Experience shows that revisions place the greatest burden on the records side: the requirement may already be applied, but evidence of that application may be missing from the file. This is most often the point causing problems in an audit.

The transition period is announced by the accreditation body and can be combined with a surveillance or reaccreditation audit. Leaving the transition to the last period means not finding an appointment when the auditor's schedule is tight.