On December 19 ,2014, amendments to FSC’s chain of custody (CoC) standard (FSC-STD-40-004) are opened to public consultation. These amendments are the result of a revision process mandated by FSC’s General Assembly. They include a new section on transaction verification that requires FSC certified organizations to implement a mechanism that allows the purchase of FSC certified goods from a certificate holder to be matched to their suppliers’ records of sales of FSC certified goods.
Choose a verification method
FSC will not dictate what system or mechanism certified organizations must use for verification of the criterion.
One tool could be the FSC Online Claims Platform, which will be made available to all certificate holders free of charge. Other methods may include manual verification (e.g. material account records specific to one FSC certified trading partner are made available upon request by another trading partner or certification body) or other automated systems (e.g. systems with a common record of input and output shared between customer and supplier).
Once certificate holders have chosen a mechanism to use, it will be up to their certification body to determine if they have met the criterion.
Implementation based on risk
The implementation of the verification criterion is expected to be risk-based. This means that certificate holders will need to demonstrate their compliance with the criterion based on the potential for mismatched records or errors. Risk factors being considered include scale, previous performance and risk associated with their particular industry and geography.
The certification body will evaluate the risk of an individual certificate holder. A framework for determining risk will be included in the FSC accreditation standard (FSC-STD-20-011) - the standard that is followed by certification bodies for CoC evaluations. This separate standard will be released for public consultation in 2015, before the CoC standard is finalized and approved.
Creating alternative solutions
We need your help in identifying the full range of verification systems that certificate holders can use if they do not want to use the OCP. We therefore ask all FSC stakeholders to get involved in the consultation and help us create a range of systems that are acceptable and accessible to all certificate holders.
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