Bounding - Testing By Laboratories Without National Accreditation

Testing By Laboratories Without National Accreditation

Testing by organisations or laboratories who hold no national accreditation for testing purposes are not subject to mandatory governmental audits of compliance with applicable requirements. Even an organisation that is nationally accredited for testing purposes may not necessarily issue test reports that provide assurance that commercial products tested by it are the same as what is being sold or used by the public.

Safety related products undergo product certification to enable their use by the public. The value of testing by organisations without accreditation for product certification is based on faith in the organisation or its ethics, or culpability. In countries in which a national authority is a present (e.g., the United States), the listings provided by large well established third-party testing and certification companies are accepted as the societal standard. In such cases, the link to the building code is through regional standards, such as the Uniform Building Code, or the Standard Building Code.

Manufacturers of products routinely test their own products and competitors' products for their own purposes, as it makes good fiscal sense to test in one's own lab before incurring the costs of a third party facility.