Audit Service Invoicing from External Auditing Bodies 

For clients with plants based outside the US and Canada, you are familiar with GFCO’s relationship with auditing body companies that perform audits on our behalf. Through the years of working with these global auditing companies, GFCO has strived to provide our certification services around the world, using auditors from those local regions. An added benefit to GFCO’s relationship with these auditing bodies is that clients can also utilize them for other certifications or to consolidate multiple certification audits. A good example would be if one of these auditing bodies performs SQF, ISO 22000, or BRC audits at your production location, the GFCO audit can be added as an addendum to those management system audits, saving time and money. Because of the potential for variability in services provided by these auditing bodies, which may include discounting and allowing clients to pay in the local currency to avoid wire fees, GFCO allows the auditing bodies to invoice the Plant directly, in cases where the Plant is the entity that holds a certification contract with GFCO. This means all audit-related fees for the GFCO audit are collected by the auditing body, and GFCO will not invoice for this audit. Clients that have received a quote from GFCO within the last few years will have seen our notice regarding the potential for direct invoicing from an external auditing body, for plants located outside of the US and Canada.

In cases where the plant receiving the audit is not contracted with GFCO, then the auditing body will invoice GIG/GFCO for the audit service. GFCO will then invoice the respective certification contract holder who is the stakeholder of the audit report. This situation will likely occur when a Product’s Brand Owner is the certification contract holder, and will receive audits at co-manufacturers or contract-manufacturers outside the US and Canada who are not directly contracted with GFCO. 

GFCO is also mindful that not all GFCO-Contracted plants outside of the US and Canada desire to set up the auditing body as an additional vendor. In such cases, if you receive an invoice from an auditing body related to GFCO audit services that you would rather pay directly to GIG/GFCO please let us know or inform the auditing body so that they can direct the invoice accordingly. 

Proficiency Testing Reminder

For all clients that purchased proficiency testing samples for GFCO’s 2023 PT round, please remember that all results must be submitted by December 31, 2023 to be reviewed and included in the 2023 final report. Submit your results at www.gluten.org/ptresults. 

Health Canada is seeking public comments on the amendment of regulations regarding food additives and compositional standards, microbiological criteria and methods of analysis of foods. These amendments represent significant changes to Part B of the Canadian Food and Drug Regulations. There are no major changes to the definition of gluten-free or to gluten-free labeling, but the overall changes may be of interest to anyone manufacturing food in Canada, or for the Canadian market. You can access the draft amendments through the link below and provide comments until February 2, 2024.

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