Product, tell me the password

Nazariy Skrypnik, Head of the Federal Service for Accreditation - how to be sure that your purchase is safe

Customers will have several ways to check quickly that the product has passed all the necessary safety tests in an accredited laboratory.

The head of RusAccreditation, Nazariy Skrypnik, told to "Rossiyskaya Gazeta" about this, as well as about the verification of water meters and the creation of a permanent soft automated control over the activities of testing laboratories and certification.

When will customers be able to quickly check certificates and declarations for products?

Nazariy Skrypnik: You can already ask for a certificate or declaration in the store, they have a number and, as a rule, a QR code. According to them in the electronic registers of RusAccreditation you can check whether the document is valid or not, was the product tested for safety according to all the rules. The registers are open, they contain a huge amount of data about products. Providing customers with understandable and easy access to them is one of the most important aims for the department. A number of steps have already been done for this.

RusAccreditation has opened a special section where you can use the registers at any time of the day and check whether the certificate for the product is valid or not, for example, before buying.

With the help of the mobile application "Honest Sign" for some products, you can already check whether there is a valid certificate or declaration. It is used to read the codes of mandatory labeling of goods, which is designed to protect buyers from counterfeit products. According to the government's plans, labeling should be implemented for most products by 2024. All shoes, some types of clothing and other goods already pass through this system and their list is constantly expanding. RusAccreditation began to fill the national labeling system with data about the safety of goods through mutual exchange. Information about 4.3 million certificates and declarations was transferred from the registers of the RusAccreditation. By the end of the first quarter of this year, all products which were included in the National labeling system will have information about the documents confirming their safety check.

We want to go further, so that data on certificates and declarations can be obtained from the GTIN barcode, simply by pointing the phone camera on it. This code is applied to all products.

The moratorium on the verification of household meters expired, and when from the end of December everyone rushed to order verification, some verification companies began to offer "remote" services – just take a picture of the meter so that the number is visible, and that's it. Moreover, now there is no need to issue a certificate of verification, just an entry in the electronic register. Do you struggle with this somehow?

Nazariy Skrypnik: Verification of water meters is carried out according to approved methods, which in all cases require the connection of reference equipment. The specialist must be close to the counter to do this. Remote verification is not possible - there are no such methods.  Citizens must be careful themselves. Only accredited organizations have the right to carry out the work. Only they can enter information about the verification in the unified register of Rosstandart.

Such an entry in the register is the only official confirmation that the water meter is verified.

We have opened an electronic service with up-to-date information about verification companies to fight against fraudsters who offer verification services, but do not have the right to do so.

There are several hundred of such organizations operating in Russia. Now citizens can get reliable information about companies that have the right to conduct verification in their region in one click. You can find an organization in the registry by its INN or name. If the company is not in it, it is better to choose another organization. Our service will also help you with this.

Since the fraudsters do not carry out any work, they put up a very attractive price tag. How much in reality should it cost to check one household water meter?

Nazariy Skrypnik: Even if the fraudsters offer a tempting price for verification, you will not be able to save money, its result will be invalid. The cost of a real service will be influenced by the demand, the specifics of the region, the peculiarities of the legal form of the verifier, etc. Each organization determines the price itself and specifies it in the contract. The cost of checking meters in different regions of the country is in the range of 300-1500 rubles depending on the type of specific device and the method of verification.

If a company makes out a million verifications during a day, even though there are three people on the staff, can you can see it in the register?

Nazariy Skrypnik: This is the most common indicator for identifying those who are dishonest, when the number of inspections carried out exceeds all imaginable physical capabilities of the company. We are working on specific risk indicators to identify violators.

The elimination of laboratories and certification agencies from the national part of the Unified Register of the EAEU has just been completed. Those who were excluded will not be able to test and certify the most popular products. How did the market change in the result?

Nazariy Skypnik: The Government has established special selection rules for those testing laboratories and certification agencies that represent our state on the territory of the EAEU in the field of safety assessment of socially significant products. These are products for children, pyrotechnics, household appliances. Such accredited persons are subject to increased requirements. They must be competent, have the necessary testing equipment, facilities, qualified personnel, and do not allow the issuance of certificates and test reports without real research.

We see that the revaluation mechanism has actually started to work and the number of unscrupulous organizations has decreased. At the same time, the revision of the conformity assessment market has increased the level of awareness and responsibility of its participants. Accredited CABs began to urgently look for personnel with specialized education and experience, to refuse to cooperate with those who previously worked in companies that issued documents without conducting real tests. Laboratories and certification agencies have started to actively update the data in the personal accounts of the FGIS RusAccreditation. So, in October-November, the number of changes per day in the register of employees of accredited persons increased by 60%.

This is an undoubted benefit because the number of potentially dangerous products is reduced, the safety tests of which could not be carried out in full or not at all.

Decisions on accredited persons are made by the Interdepartmental Council of the National Quality Infrastructure, which includes the leadership of 16 federal departments. As a result, the Council adopted 73.6% of positive decisions on the received applications for revaluation and new inclusions in the national part of the unified register of the EAEU. Organizations excluded or not included in the register do not have the right to represent the state in the Eurasian space, but they can continue working in other areas in the field of accreditation. Almost all of them immediately began to eliminate the identified inconsistencies and a lot of them submitted repeated applications for inclusion. In the near future, the council will consider them, then the first stage on the formation of the national part of the Unified Register of the EAEU will be completed.

Further, we will regularly monitor deviations in the activities of persons included in the register and again submit to the Council the question of their compliance with the criteria if it will be necessary.

How many of the excluded market leaders are there?

Nazariy Skypnik: In the conformity assessment market there are no players with a critical amount of work to do. There are no companies whose disappearance would immediately lead to the fact that there is no place to test, for example, children's products or personal protective equipment. And there was no decrease in the number of certificates issued as laboratories and certification agencies were removed from the register. The market remains stable.

The law on the withdrawal of certificates will come into force in the summer, but the rules themselves have not yet been approved. What will be the withdrawal mechanism? In which cases will the certificates be invalidated? The market had a lot of concerns about this.

Nazariy Skypnik: There are hardly any grounds for concern. First, if the certification body is closed to avoid verification, we have the right to archive all the results of its activities for the last three years. Sometimes four or five thousand certificates were sent. Secondly, if we see violations - in other words, the test report is "fake" - we demand to terminate the certificates. And if the company does not do this, then we either reduce its scope of accreditation, or completely terminate its accreditation and transfer the certificates to the archive.

The withdrawal mechanism will now become faster. The most important thing is that the right to recognize certificates as invalid will be held by the state control agencies for products: Ruspotrebnadzor, Russelkhoznadzor, Ruszdravnadzor and others.

There will be fewer "unattended" certificates. Now the certification authority has opened, issued a lot of five-year certificates and closed a year later. If the certificates are serial, once a year you need to go to inspect the production. Who will do it? In addition, we often received complaints about certification authority that demanded a lot of money from manufacturers for inspections, threatening to terminate the certificate. Now the amendments to the law will allow transferring the certification case from one authority to another for further control.

How do you understand that the tests were not carried out and all the documents are just "drawn"?

Nazariy Skypnik: According to various signs, it can be concluded that the tests were not carried out in full or with violations. For example, a child's toy must be tested for at least five days, and the tests actually lasted a day. There are cases when different products were tested on the same equipment, the design of which and the testing technology do not allow this to be done. If the laboratory did not have the right to test a specific product, then the protocol was made by incompetent people. This is also one of the reasons for invalidating the certificate.

The RusAccreditation information system annually receives data about 20 million test reports. Taking into account the scale of our country, it is effective to use artificial intelligence to automate the search for deviations. You can calculate the average test time, for example, for a child's toy, and compare the data from the new protocols uploaded to the system with them. The only question is how to teach artificial intelligence to correctly recognize a protocol for which there is no specific form.

We plan to establish more precise requirements for test protocols in the working frames with our colleagues in the EAEU (RusAccreditation will coordinate the working group on digitalization in the Council of Heads of Accreditation Agencies of the EAEU. - Ed.). Then we will move on to the electronic form of the protocols, to their automatic upload to our system and analysis. This is part of a project to create an electronic archive of the activities of accredited individuals.

Even now, we offer market participants to fill our system with data about their work as much as possible. That is how we encourage laboratories to increase transparency.

What segments of the market are you most concerned about right now?

Nazariy Skypnik: Our special focus is on consumer goods (for example, food products), socially sensitive products (baby strollers and bicycles, toys). We plan to use solutions based on artificial intelligence technologies for the analysis of test reports to improve the quality and efficiency of control in these areas.

Business also gives us signals from the market. RusAccreditation checked laboratories and certification agencies that worked with wheels, pipes, and cement at the initiative of manufacturers ' associations. The Association sees, for example, that previously consumed pipes are used under state contracts, although they must be new and through the conformity assessment mechanism tries to restore order in the market. It is right.

Our goal is to work more closely with suppliers as well. They should be careful when choosing a counterparty. We are currently developing a checklist so that customers can choose a conscientious laboratory. We plan to make a service for finding accredited persons based on the configurator of electronic accreditation areas. This is part of our project to create digital duplicates of laboratories (including data on activities, test methods, employees, equipment). You can compare this to choosing a TV on the marketplace - you set the diagonal, the manufacturer and other parameters for the search. We will have the same filter for accredited persons, so that, for example, suitable testing laboratories can be selected by region and product.

The use of information technologies will create a permanent, but soft control by the information system of RusAccreditation, which will encourage organizations and entrepreneurs to work in the right direction.

Are there any new challenges facing RusAccreditation?

Nazariy Skypnik: The development of the National accreditation system keeps pace with the times, and accreditation is expanding its presence in socially important areas, such as medicine and ecology.

We expect the advent of two new types of accredited persons in these important areas.

These are medical laboratories which ones will be given a choice of state standards for accreditation. Their allocation to a separate category of accredited persons corresponds to international practice.

And we hope that this year there will be authorities for the validation and verification of greenhouse gases. Their work will allow us to implement climate projects to reduce harmful emissions into the atmosphere and to increase the absorption of greenhouse gases. The beginning of accreditation in this area is also important for the image of Russia at the international level.