Key takeaways
- 1The certificate is older than the accreditation. A certification body's scope grows.
- 2CAS was first accredited on 28 November 2025.
- 3A register is a live operational record, not a history.
Every register you can search is a snapshot of the present. Every certificate you can hold is a statement about a moment in the past.
Most of the time the two agree, and nobody notices the difference. When they disagree, almost nobody has a method for it.
The two directions a gap can open
The certificate is older than the accreditation. A certification body's scope grows. Schemes are added, technical sectors are added, and each addition has a date. A body accredited for a scheme in 2025 was not accredited for it in 2023 — and the register entry you read today will show the scheme without showing when it arrived.
So a certificate issued in 2023, carrying an accreditation number that resolves cleanly in 2026, may be describing an arrangement that did not exist when the audit happened. The register is telling you the truth. It is answering about now.
The certificate is newer than the register entry. Scope can also narrow, and a certification can be suspended while the body remains accredited — under ISO/IEC 17021-1 §9.6.5.3, a management system certification under suspension is temporarily invalid. We have written about that direction before; it is the better-known half.
The first direction is the one with no coverage anywhere, including in our own earlier writing.
Our own dates make the point without any rhetoric
CAS was first accredited on 28 November 2025. Accreditation certificate 012418A, schedule 012418B, valid to 27 November 2029.
It follows, with no interpretation required, that no CAS certificate whose effective date of granting or renewal falls before 28 November 2025 can be an EGAC-accredited CAS certificate. Not because of anything about the document — because of arithmetic.
That qualifier is load-bearing, and it cuts the other way. The note to §8.2.2 b) lets a body keep the original certification date on a certificate where the current cycle's start and expiry dates are shown — so a genuine document can legitimately display a date older than the decision behind it. Read the effective date, not the oldest date printed.
That is the shape of the question in general. Not is this body accredited, which is what the number answers. But was this body accredited, for this scheme, on the day this certificate says it was issued.
Why registers answer that question badly
A register is a live operational record, not a history. It is maintained so that the current state is correct, and being correct about the present is a different engineering problem from being complete about the past.
That is not a criticism. It is what the tool is for. Expecting a live register to reconstruct a body's scope on an arbitrary past date is asking a thermometer what the temperature was last March.
Two consequences follow, and they are both practical.
A clean register result never establishes anything about the issue date. It cannot. Nothing you can read off it carries a date except the entry's own currency.
The gap widens with the age of the document. A certificate issued last month and a certificate issued three years ago are not equally well described by today's register entry, even when both resolve to the same number.
What to ask instead, and where the dated answer sits
Ask the certification body directly, and be specific: was your accreditation for this scheme in place on the date this certificate was issued?
Then be equally specific about what backs that question, which is nothing. ISO/IEC 17021-1 §8.1.2 obliges a certification body to provide, on request, three things: the geographical areas in which it operates, the status of a given certification, and the name, normative document, scope and location of a specific certified client. Its NOTE 2 adds that a body may publish all of that without waiting to be asked. None of the three is date-addressable, and none of them reaches a body's own accreditation scope in a past year.
So the dated question is a reasonable ask with no clause behind it — which is a reason to put it in both directions rather than one. To the certification body, for the scope it held on the issue date. And to the accreditation body, which granted that scope and dated the grant.
The short version for a file note
Three facts, and they do not collapse into each other.
The body is accredited today. From the accreditation body's register.
This certification exists and is current. From a register that indexes certifications, searched by the certified organisation's name and the certificate's unique identification code.
The accreditation covered this scheme on the issue date. From the certification body or the accreditation body, in writing, if the certificate is old enough for it to matter. This one you have to ask for, and no clause obliges the answer.
The first is the one everybody checks. The third is the one nobody asks for, and it is the only one that connects the other two to a document with a date on it.
CAS — An EGAC accredited MS certification body No. 012418 for ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001, ISO 22000, ISO 50001 and ISO 22301. First accredited 28 November 2025; accreditation certificate 012418A, schedule 012418B, valid to 27 November 2029.
Check a certificate: cas.com.eg/certsearch
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