As an important measure to further strengthen and enhance the acceptance of the MTCC scheme in the international market, the Malaysian Timber Certification Council (MTCC) will be implementing a number of activities to establish a new institutional arrangement for the MTCC scheme. The new institutional arrangement is one of the measure taken to meet the requirements for endorsement by the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) and the timber procurement policies which have been implemented by importing countries (such as the United Kingdom and Denmark) or are in the process of being finalised (such as in Germany and The Netherlands).
In the present institutional arrangement(click), MTCC plays the role of the National Governing Body (NGB) as well as the Certification Body (CB) which issues certificates based on assessments by independent assessors. Under the new arrangement(click), MTCC will continue to play the role of the NGB in the timber certification scheme with, the independent assessors taking on the role of CBs which would need to be accredited to the Department of Standards Malaysia (DSM), Malaysia’s national Accreditation Body (AB).
A target date of 1 April 2008 has been set for the establishment and operation of the new institutional arrangement. Thus, all assessments and surveillance visits will be conducted by CBs which have been accredited to DSM under the forest management and chain-of-custody certification accreditation programme. The CBs will also be responsible for issuing the MTCC certificate to any applicant which has been assessed and found to comply with the relevant certification standard.
As part of the process to encourage the assessors to become accredited to the DSM as soon as possible, with effect from 1 April 2007, only CBs which have been accredited with DSM under the relevant ISO Guides such as Guides 62, 65 or 66 under other programmes [such as the ISO 9001 (quality management system) and ISO 14000 (environmental management system)] will be appointed to conduct assessments and surveillance visits under the MTCC scheme.