How long does it take the Certification Body to approve a submitted Corrective Action Report?
We had our audit on October 30-31, and we passed with a few minors, most of which were fixed while the auditor was present.
First off, thank you to this forum, my dumb newbie questions were answered, and helped me greatly.
Now, for the CA. It took the auditor about a week to get me the report, once I had it, he had my corrective actions, CAPA Reports, and documents/pictures back to him inside of 72 hours. It states that I have until 11/29 for all of this to be approved, and I haven't seen anything since I sent it back to him and the AB on 11/7/24.
At what point do I become worried?
We didn't have anything major, some wording in documents, some debris under a freezer trailer, etc, nothing to warrant a long investigation. All was corrected and documented, and sent over.
Obviously, I want my certificate, so, if I don't see anything by Monday, I'll call or email, but does it usually take this long to respond to the corrective actions?
You can always ping the certification body to check on the status. If you have confirmation from the Auditor that your submitted corrective actions are approved, its now in the hands of the CB. I had my audit October 8th & 9th and still pending on the certificate and final report. I've been pinging them weekly on a status update for the last 3 weeks. Yes I am finding and I think others that just getting the cert and report are taking longer than usual, this is across multiple CB's.
Do not ignore this, call your CB today for follow up
Corrective actions are timed, so if they don't get approved, you may be inadvertently euchred
Call the CB now.
I'd follow up with the auditor and someone else from the CB via email regardless of if you called or not just to make sure they've even received what you have submitted. We had our audit October 2nd and they accepted the CA's but they haven't issued a certificate yet. It is my understanding that just about every CB is severely short staffed, not just on the auditor side but on technical and clerical sides. It's a frustrating issue when you're doing all you can, but the CB who is getting thousands of dollars out of this, can't get their act together. I know some auditors will wait until closer to due dates to review things, which isn't fair in case they don't accept a CA, while others are more timely with responses once a CA has been submitted. I've experienced both types of auditors.
We are switching CB's this year for this issue amongst many others, so just know you aren't alone in the poor response time.
This happened to me before, reach back out to the auditor, mine opened while at airport and didn't realized I submitted them to her.