It’s been 18 months since I first walked into JASANZ as the new Marketing and Communications Coordinator. With a background mostly working for community-based non-profit organisations, this was the first time I had ever heard about accreditation.

Working with JASANZ over the past 18 months has opened my eyes to something I had only ever taken for granted; and recently, that was made very clear to me.

How can we really trust a product or service that declares itself to be certified as safe?

Recently, my partner and I were making a sales purchase and, as part of the process, an identity verification needed to be conducted. I was at work when I received a link to the online identity verification application with instructions on using it.

At first, I thought this would be the usual identity check that we’re all used to: name, address, birth date, and proof of ID. But, as I read further, I learnt the application also needed to access my camera for facial recognition and record a voice sample. Suddenly, I felt a little anxious.

It seems almost every other week we hear about some kind of cyber-security breach or leaked and stolen identity. Thankfully, working in the conformity assessment sector has taught me one very important thing: to always verify an organisation and check its certifications.

I first began by looking up the organisation’s website and I could see that they were certified against, amongst others, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, the standard for information security management systems (ISMS). This was a great first step.

But if I was really going to trust this organisation enough to hand over sensitive, personal information, I wanted an extra level of assurance. I visited the JASANZ Register, an online directory and record of JASANZ-accredited certification bodies, certificate recipients, and endorsed schemes.

With relief, I found the organisation was not only certified, but they were certified by a JASANZ-accredited certification body.

With that, I proceeded with the online identity verification process with a good level of trust and gave reassurance to my partner who was anxious about doing the same.

So why does this matter?

Accreditation plays a vital role in ensuring that audits conducted by certification bodies are performed competently to deliver consistent results. Put simply, JASANZ “audits the auditors”.

This provides a greater level of trust to the end-user, including consumers like you and me. But not many people have heard of JASANZ or even know about accreditation, and that’s something that I have begun working to change over the past 18 months.

Apart from providing trust, accreditation also helps break down barriers to trade. Accreditation bodies across the world work together through membership organisations to ensure that their certification bodies are auditing products, services, and people against the same criteria in the same way to produce consistent conformity assessment results. Mutual recognition agreements (MRA) between accreditation bodies across the globe reduce the need for duplicate testing, inspecting, or certification, and save both time and money, increasing economic efficiency.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of how accreditation positively impacts our lives every day, and it’s been my pleasure over the past 18 months to learn more about it and help to promote it, raising the profile of our hidden safety network.

For me, as someone who now works in the sector, I am more aware than most of how JASANZ and the technical infrastructure contribute to things we often take for granted, like being able to safely drink the water that comes out of Australian taps. But I was especially grateful on this occasion to also know what to look for when assessing an identification verification app for trustworthiness.