The certificate on the wall proves less than you think

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Why the scope question comes first

Clients usually ask whether a body is accredited. It is the wrong question, asked in good faith. Accreditation is granted per scope, examination by examination and method by method, which means a body accredited for one test is not thereby accredited for the next one along. The right question is whether a body is accredited for the method your report requires. A result produced outside that scope is not fraudulent and not necessarily wrong. It is simply a technical opinion rather than an accredited finding, and if your insurer, your buyer or an authority asked for the latter, an opinion will not do.

Alongside that sits a second question, which is reservation. Several examinations in Belgium may only be carried out by a body holding a specific approval or recognition, among them examinations of electrical installations, lifting equipment and pressure equipment. Expertise does not substitute for that status, and a report issued without it does not become valid by being correct. So the honest sequence is to establish what the report is for, establish who is required to sign it, and only then talk about doing the work, which sometimes means saying out loud that the work belongs to somebody else.

Then there is impartiality, which is the limit nobody volunteers. The inspection standard separates a body providing independent third-party inspection from one that forms part of the organisation whose items it inspects, and from one that supplies or installs what it inspects under defined safeguards, and that distinction constrains how a report may be used. The practical consequence is that no one can validly act as an independent third party on their own design, supply or installation, so prior involvement gets disclosed before an examination is accepted rather than discovered afterwards. The same applies to the architect question: plans and site supervision for permit work are reserved to an architect in Belgium, and an engineering office is not one. A report that states its scope, its method, its exclusions and the status of the body behind it is worth considerably more than a confident one that states none of them.