Fees and Charges decision 2023 & increase preparation and reporting time

We attach great importance to customer and employee satisfaction. To this end, we specifically collect feedback. If we look at our (external) assessors, we see that they are happy to work for the Dutch Accreditation Council with the motivation to contribute to the quality infrastructure. From this feedback, there are several signals that in recent years the ratio between time actually spent on assessment and billable time has come under increasing pressure.

In addition to the annual adjustment of rates, it was therefore decided to increase the preparation time of Technical Assessors by 2 hours, bringing the total time spent on preparation and reporting per assessment to 6 hours. This increase in preparation time only applies to Technical Assessors because, compared to Lead Assessors, they generally have less work routine to build up in terms of getting to know the organisation to be assessed as well as the Dutch Accreditation Council’s working methods and systems.

The Dutch Accreditation Council aims to allocate accreditation costs as much as possible to the user of the accreditation. Organising assessments abroad requires an extra effort from the office organisation compared to assessments in the Netherlands. It was therefore decided to charge a cross-frontier accreditation fee for assessments abroad. Although these decisions have no direct effect on the tariffs and the tariff decision for 2023, they obviously affect the costs to be invoiced to clients.