How GSTC certification works

Not formally — you can engage a CB directly. But read the separation the right way round, because it is a constraint on your auditor, not on you. Clause 8.5.1 sits under “Management of Impartiality”, a section of requirements placed on the CB: personnel who have provided consultancy services to a client “shall not conduct audits, participate in the review process, or make certification decisions for that client for at least two (2) years.” Clause 8.5.2 closes the other direction — if CB personnel involved in your audit or decision later become involved with you as staff, contractors or consultants within two years, the CB must go back and review that audit and every decision arising from it.

The rule is that nobody can both advise you and judge you. If a CB’s own staff coached you through closing your gaps, those staff could not then audit you, review the audit, or make the decision — not for two years. Advising you costs that CB the people it would need to certify you. That is why the two are separate roles rather than one service — and the Manual treats the consultant as a legitimate role in its own right: in group certification the group manager “may be a cooperative of group members, an association, a consultant, or an external auditing body, but shall not be the CB itself.”

Advice itself is not the problem; pairing advice and audit on the same client is. The Manual says as much for internal auditors in a group — they “may provide advice to group members, but they shall not audit those members to whom they have provided advice” — and notes that general awareness training creates no conflict at all. Expect your CB to tell you that something does not conform, and not to tell you how to fix it. Whoever does that second part — a consultant, your own team, or a platform like this one — is doing work the CB is barred from doing for you. It is also why TavaSIS never makes a conformity judgement of its own.