Cologne, 4 April 2017

Introduction

ISCC is continuously engaged in improving the certification system. This also includes the enhancement of the transparency of ISCC.

As one crucial measure to enhancing the transparency, ISCC is introducing summary audit reports for all ISCC certified system users that will be made publicly available on the ISCC website. Currently, system users can agree on a voluntary basis if the audit reports that are completed by the certification body during the audit will be uploaded on the ISCC website. Since these reports often contain sensitive company information, many system users have opted against a publication. ISCC received feedback from various stakeholders, including NGOs, that the publication of summary audit reports would be very important in terms of improving ISCC’s transparency.

The now available template of a summary audit report was developed in a multi-stakeholder process. At the General Assembly of the ISCC Association (ISCC e.V.) in 2016 the members agreed to set up a “Working Group Transparency”. The objective of this working group was to elaborate a template for a summary audit report to serve a better transparency of ISCC whilst ensuring the need to protect sensitive company internal information.

20 members of ISCC e.V. representing all stakeholder groups participated in the working group and provided their valuable and insightful input to compile a proposal of the summary audit report. The proposal was shared with the ISCC e.V. Board as well as with all other ISCC e.V. members before it was finally presented at the ISCC e.V. General Assembly 2017. A three month transition period was agreed.

Content and application

The summary audit report shall provide an overview on relevant aspects and results of the audit of a certified ISCC system user. The report shall not contain confidential or business sensitive information or data. All information relevant for the report are verified during audits already today, so no additional information will be requested.
The following topics are covered in the report:

• Information on the certification body and the audit team
• Information on the system user and audit process; including risk assessment and a summary of activities and audit results

The summary audit report will be compiled by the certification body based on the ISCC audit procedures that have to be used during audits. The certification body will send the report to ISCC, together with the other relevant certification documents. After reviewing the documents ISCC will publish the certificate and the summary audit report on the ISCC website.

With the application of the APS (Audit Procedure System) Tool, the certification body can generate the summary audit report automatically from the tool (no extra paper work required).