ISO Committee on Conformity Assessment (CASCO)

CASCO is one of four policy development committees of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), reporting to the ISO General Assembly. Participation is open to all ISO member bodies and to the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The CASCO Chairman is appointed by ISO Council for a three-year term of office. The current CASCO Chairman is John Donaldson (ANSI-USA). A list of current ISO standards and guides related to conformity assessment is available on the ISO Website.

CASCO's terms of reference include the preparation of international guides and standards relating to the testing, inspection and certification of products, processes and services, and to the assessment of quality systems, testing laboratories, inspection bodies, certification bodies and their operation and acceptance. To date, CASCO has published 19 Guides. Current work underway includes the revision of Guide 25 (General requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories); Guide 66 (environmental management system certification) and several other ongoing work items which are still being considered at the working group level.

NIST participates in CASCO through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the U.S. member body to ISO. Sixty-one ISO members participate in CASCO; 21 members have observer status. ANSI participation in CASCO is coordinated by ANSI's International Conformity Assessment Committee (ICAC), which provides Working Group representatives, fields delegations for CASCO meetings and develops the ANSI position on CASCO documents. NIST is represented on the ICAC and also on a newly formed CASCO Working Group, established jointly with the Joint European Committee for Standardization/European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CEN/CENELEC) Technical Committee 1. The working group will review the feasibility/desirability of establishing a long range strategy and process for restructuring the EN 45000 series standards and the appropriate ISO Guides to:

1.   Improve their consistency with each other;
2.   More accurately reflect the functions of the conformity assessment process; and
3.   Facilitate application of both the standards and the guides by their users.

A representative from OSS serves as one of the CASCO representatives on the JWG.

For further information contact:

Mary Saunders
NIST
100 Bureau Drive, MS 2100
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-2100
Telephone:  (301)975-2396
Fax:  (301) 963-2871
Email:  mary.saunders@nist.gov