ASC SURVEILLANCE AUDIT

An ASC Farm Certificate is valid for three years. Following successful certification, certified farms are required to undertake annual surveillance audits to demonstrate continued compliance with the ASC Standard.

The annual surveillance audit focuses on reviewing progress against any conditions placed on the aquaculture operation and changes to farm operations and management. Each surveillance audit need not cover the entire ASC Standard, however, the entire ASC Standard must be addressed across the combined surveillance audits.

As is the case in an initial assessment, surveillance audits are publicly announced before audit activities take place and stakeholders may submit comments to the assessment team. Stakeholders have the opportunity to meet the assessment team upon request during the site visit. An audit report is published but there is no opportunity for comment.

bio.inspecta makes every attempt to combine surveillance audits with those of other certified farms that we are responsible for, to deliver cost savings on travel expenses.

If you have multiple sites operating under the same regulatory and internal management systems, there is the potential to adopt a multi-site approach. A multi-site assessment includes an audit of all sites, however, reporting is combined delivering efficiencies and costs savings.

The ASC group certification process is designed to bring efficiency to the ASC certification of organised groups of separate small producers. This approach can make certification affordable for small operations that would otherwise find the cost of certification prohibitive.

Specific requirements are in place to support that efficiency as well as to ensure that all group members comply with all relevant requirements in the applicable ASC Standard (for instance, that the group management body has conducted internal audits of all sites). As a result, the group certification process allows a subset (sample) of the total number of farms to be audited by the Conformity Assessment Body.

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