Posted By Robert K Lewis No they cannot as certification and use is via 3rd Party auditors accreddited for the work. You can always declare yourself compliant but that provides no externally verified evidence. Bob

Posted By Ciaran McAleenan Chris There is no logo for OHSAS 18001. The logo relates to the organisation that carried out the audit, using the BSI OHSAS 18001:1999 specification. As you correctly point out an audit to this specification can be carried internally and declared as meeting the specification. Since there isn't an ISO there is no UKAS accreditation for auditors. This means everyone has the right/ freedom to carry out and declare that their audits have met the OHSAS 18001 standard. There are many organisations and probably even more individuals sufficiently competent to do just that. You or someone in your company may possess the auditor competence and therefore your professional judgement should stand the test against any of the external bodies. External or 3rd party will probably only be an issue if your client demands it. Regards Ciaran

Posted By Derek Holt Chris, Interesting perspective. As discussed, you can assess your own organisation to any 'certified' management standard be that 9001, 14001 etc. etc. By having this undertaken by a third party, I suppose it in effect adds more credibility. It has been heavily reported that one of the key drivers for third party 'certification' of ISO 9000 has been customer/supply chain pressure. I wonder if anyone has experienced the same with OHSAS 18001? BSI and LRQA have only certified approximately 1500 organisations to OHSAS 18001 between them, so is this an indication that those at/near the top of supply chains are not specifying such? Will this change over time?

Posted By Chris Boocock Thanks for the responses. I've read some stuff recently about the tendency for companies to drop 3rd party accreditation as companies are beginning to feel that 3rd party acccreditation is very expensive and adds little value (something around smoke & mirrors). Indeed from talking around industry, my perception is that some companies prefer to train their own auditors and verify their own compliance. I understand it is possible to make a self determination with respect to compliance with say, OHSAS 18001, but is it possible to do that with HSG65 or BS8800? Thanks in advance.