Slovakia: SNAS issues guideline MSA-09 — criteria for accreditation bodies to evaluate conformity assessment schemes and scheme owners (a Global ACI document)
The Slovak National Accreditation Service (SNAS) has issued methodological guideline MSA-09, effective from 25 September 2026. It is a translation of Global ACI-TECH-3-019 (M), version 1.0 of 10 July 2026, “Criteria for Evaluation of Conformity Assessment Schemes (CASs) and Scheme Owners (SOs)”.
- The document is based on IAF MD 25:2023 “Criteria for evaluation of conformity assessment schemes”. Following the transfer of IAF’s role to Global Accreditation Cooperation Incorporated (Global ACI), the text was reformatted as a Global ACI document without substantive changes in content. The new edition of MSA-09 replaces the version of 8 March 2024.
- MSA-09 applies to Global ACI members that accredit certification of management systems, persons, products, processes and services, as well as validation and verification. It sets minimum requirements for national, regional or international schemes that accreditation bodies apply when evaluating them, in order to meet clause 4.6.3 of ISO/IEC 17011.
- The guideline does not apply to schemes covered or required by legislation or regulation, or to schemes developed by national, regional or international standards bodies; this does not, however, preclude evaluating a scheme referenced in legislation against it. In the document “should” indicates a recognised means of meeting a requirement — a conformity assessment body may meet it in an equivalent way if it can demonstrate this to the accreditation body.
- The document defines, among other things, the conformity assessment scheme, the scheme owner, authorisation of a body by the scheme owner, scheme-specific requirements for conformity assessment bodies and for accreditation bodies, and the regulator, and then sets out requirements for the scheme owner, for the scheme itself and the evaluation process. Criteria for including a scheme in the Global ACI MRA are given in a separate document, Global ACI-MRA-003.