Key takeaways
- 1The service catalogue is written by the certification body itself.
- 2The accreditation schedule is written by the accreditation body.
- 3It is tempting to treat a body's marketing as a shorter version of the catalogue.
A certification body maintains two lists of schemes. They have different authors, different completeness rules and different silences.
Advertising is not one of them. It is a selection drawn from the first list for commercial reasons, and it belongs to a different category altogether — which is why comparing bodies by their campaigns produces confident wrong answers.
The catalogue: complete, and self-authored
The service catalogue is written by the certification body itself. It covers every scheme the body operates, whether that scheme carries accreditation or not.
It exists because ISO/IEC 17021-1 §8.1.1 c) requires a certification body to make public, without request, the types of management systems and certification schemes in which it operates.
Read the limit precisely. That requirement is an availability floor. It says nothing about prominence, nothing about ordering, and nothing about channel — and it has no view at all on what a body chooses to advertise. Its weakness is structural: the list is complete according to the body that wrote it, and nobody outside has verified that nothing is missing.
The schedule: checked, and deliberately narrow
The accreditation schedule is written by the accreditation body. Not by the certification body, and not with its agreement required.
It covers only what was assessed and granted. That is a much smaller claim than the catalogue makes, and a much better supported one.
Here is the structural point that carries this whole page: the two documents fail in opposite directions.
The catalogue is complete but self-authored. The schedule is third-party checked but silent about everything outside its boundary — and that silence is not a judgement, it is simply the edge of what was assessed.
Neither is sufficient alone. And the absence has to be read as carefully as everything else on this page.
A scheme in the catalogue and absent from this schedule is not accredited by this accreditation body. That is the whole of what it establishes. It may be certified under the body's own authority; it may be accredited by a different accreditation body, since a schedule is one accreditation body's grant and not a global register; or it may be issued by a partner body with the seller acting as agent. All three are real and lawful, all three are frequently the exact thing a customer asked for, and the schedule in front of you cannot tell them apart.
Which is what the second half of the question is for. A scheme in both documents is accredited certification — by the accreditation body that wrote that schedule.
Advertising is not a third list
It is tempting to treat a body's marketing as a shorter version of the catalogue. It is not a version of it at all.
A selection is authored by the seller and cut to a length the seller chose, so completeness is not a property it can have — not because anyone did anything wrong, but because that is what a selection is. Reading a scheme list off marketing is a category error, and it produces answers that feel reliable because they came in a sentence.
Note what the standard does and does not ask for here. §8.1.3 requires everything a certification body tells the marketplace, advertising included, to be accurate and not misleading. It does not require an advert to be complete, because no rule could — which is exactly why completeness has to be sought in the two documents that carry it.
Our own campaigns are the worked example: they cover seven things, our catalogue covers more, and one of the seven is not accredited.
What happened to the evidence in your hand
If what you are holding is not a page you navigated to but a screenshot somebody forwarded, ask what happened to it on the way.
It was cropped, and the qualifying line sat below the crop.
It arrived without its page, so whatever surrounded it is gone.
It compressed — ten names under one heading read as ten items of one kind, because that is what a heading does to a list.
It was retold, a week later, from memory, with no document in the room.
None of that requires anyone to have said anything untrue. It is what happens to information in transit, and it is the reason to go to a fixed address rather than trust what was sent to you.
When the advert and the catalogue disagree
They will disagree. Routinely, for every certification body including this one, because that is simply what selection means. A gap between the two is not a finding about anybody.
So when you find one, it is not a reason for suspicion and not a reason for comfort. It is a prompt to go and read the two documents that are built to answer the question.
Two questions do the rest, and both have checkable answers. Which of these schemes is covered by your accreditation? And by which accreditation body?
CAS — An EGAC accredited MS certification body No. 012418 for ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001, ISO 22000, ISO 50001 and ISO 22301. Accreditation certificate 012418A, schedule 012418B, first accredited 28 November 2025.
Our accreditation schedule: cas.com.eg/accreditation
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