ACCS Quality Policy

The Age Check Certification Scheme objectives

• To assist in ensuring robust age verification techniques are deployed for the prevention of harm to children and nuisance caused by young people from access to restricted goods, services and digital content
• To develop a fair, credible, competent age check certification scheme that commands the respect of regulators, the industry and consumers
• To work with the age verification industry to be the leading certification body in the field and working towards an international standard for age check services supported by formal accreditation of certification schemes throughout the world
• To grow our client base year on year, with emphasis on providing certification services across both online and offline age check processes.

The vision for ACCS is to be a global leader for independent certification of age check practices.

The mission for ACCS is to protect the children of the world from the harms associated with access to age restricted products, content or services.

The values for ACCS are:

• Leadership: Having the courage to shape the world we operate in for the good of children and young people
• Competence: Being brilliant at what we do and a font of knowledge about age check laws and best practice
• Integrity: Acting honestly, impartially and inspiring the confidence of others
• Inclusivity: Fostering a safe space where people can thrive and develop to be their best

The Age Check Certification Scheme Quality Policies

ACCS is committed to providing certification services which allow its customers to truly demonstrate their deployment of precautions and diligence to comply with age restricted goods, services and digital content legislation. We are committed to providing a credible service that will help customers to provide consistent, reliable and robust age check services and processes.

ACCS’s certification is designed to provide a service that adds real value to its customers’ businesses. As well as providing certification, we also wish to support our customers, as permitted by our accreditation rules, for example by providing services to help market their business and establish the expectation of age check challenge, training for their staff and development of model age check best practices.

The technical requirements of our schemes are high, in order to ensure that they provide something of value. However, once a customer has met the technical requirements, we believe that they should be able to achieve certification swiftly with minimal fuss, without having to battle with our administrative procedures, or unacceptable lead times. Our operation has a strong emphasis on customer service, so that our customers can quickly deal with the certification and carry on with their core business.

Auditors must understand our customer’s business, and be fully knowledgeable about age check practices, and how the age check processes should be deployed, installed and maintained to achieve the required levels of compliance. This knowledge should ideally be obtained from years of experience working within the regulatory field, age check or identity industry or retail/licensed hospitality/gambling or age restricted service provider industries.

We take the approach of training technically competent people to audit, rather than employing trained auditors, then attempting to pass on technical knowledge. Customers can therefore expect any observations, recommendations and requirements raised to be beneficial to their business.

We will set our audit test requirements to give credibility to the schemes, without putting an unrealistic burden on customers. Audit samples must be demonstrated to be representative of the systems or processes deployed and are taken at appropriate intervals to give confidence in the age check practices adopted.