Complaints

Two kinds of complaint

About UMA. Our conduct, our auditors, our process, our people, our invoicing, or a certification decision where you are not the organisation concerned.

About an organisation we have certified. If you believe a certified organisation's management system does not do what its certification says it does, that matters to us — a certificate is our statement, and if it is wrong we need to know. This is one of the ways a certification body finds out its own audit was insufficient.

What we cannot handle is a complaint about a certified organisation's product, service, billing or customer service as such. Take that to them, or to the regulator for their sector. We can only look at whether their management system is conforming.

You do not have to give your name

We investigate anonymous complaints. The only thing anonymity costs you is that we cannot come back to you: we cannot ask a clarifying question, and we cannot tell you what we found. The complaint is still investigated and still recorded.

If you do give your name, we will not disclose your identity to the organisation complained about unless you agree, or unless the law requires it of us.

How to complain

Write to us at contact@umacerts.ae. Tell us:

• who the complaint concerns — UMA, or a certified organisation by name
• what happened, and when
• anything you have that supports it
• how to reach you, if you want to know the outcome

What happens next

1. We acknowledge within 5 working days, where you have given us a way to reply.
2. We confirm whether it concerns something we certified. If it does not, we say so and, where we can, point you to who can help.
3. We appoint an investigator with no interest in the outcome. Nobody investigates a complaint about their own work, their own audit or their own decision.
4. We investigate and decide within 30 days, and tell you the outcome in writing. Where the complaint was about a certified organisation, that can include a short-notice audit — and where it was about us, it results in a corrective action recorded against our own management system.

Complaining about us costs a client nothing

This needs saying plainly, because the fear is reasonable: a client might worry that complaining about an auditor makes the next audit harder. It does not. No complaint is ever taken into account in an audit, a finding or a certification decision. An auditor does not decide who audits them next, and a complaint is not visible as leverage over your certification.

Records

Every complaint is recorded, along with what we did about it and how it ended. Those records are part of what our accreditation body examines — including complaints we did not uphold.