The purpose of the Confidentiality Policy is to ensure that all employees, committee members, contractors, personnel of external bodies or individuals working on behalf of ABAC Certification understand the company’s requirements in relation to the disclosure of ABAC Certification’s client confidential information. This policy is not intended to prevent disclosure where disclosure is required by law.
ABAC Certification is committed to providing confidential certification services to its clients, including information about the client, e.g. complainants and regulators and shall not disclose to others or use without permission any confidential technical or business information belonging either to ABAC Certification, its’ partners, agents, customers or clients. This includes any information learnt or originated during ABAC Certification activity, whether it is written or otherwise tangible that is not generally available to the public and/ or gives one who uses it advantage over competition.
For this policy, confidentiality relates to the transmission of client, sensitive or identifiable information about individuals or organizations (confidential information), which comes into the possession of ABAC Certification through its Management System certification activities.
ABAC Certification shall inform the client, in advance, of the information it intends to place in
the public domain. All other information, except for information that is made publicly accessible by the client, shall be considered confidential.
ABAC Certification recognizes that occasions may arise where individual employees feel they need to breach confidentiality. Confidential or sensitive information relating to an individual or an organization may be divulged where there is risk of danger to an individual, client, or where it is against the law to withhold it. In these circumstances, information may be divulged to external agencies e.g. Police, Health and Safety Executive, Environmental Protection Agency on a need to know basis.
Where an ABAC Certification employee or someone operating on its behalf feel that confidentiality should be breached the decision will be based on review of Impartiality Committee.
All ABAC Certification employees and those operating on its behalf will receive a copy of the confidentiality policy and sign a confidentiality agreement. Existing and new workers will be introduced to the confidentiality policy via induction and training.
Breaches of this policy are dealt as under the ABAC Certification Grievance and/or Disciplinary procedures as appropriate.
This policy will be reviewed annually, and amendments will be proposed and agreed by the Impartiality Committee as per ISO/IEC 17021-1:2015.
Signed,
KANWAL ZAFAR
Managing Director ABAC Center of Excellence Limited
CRI-POL-003, Rev. 1.0, Date 04-10-2018
