ISO/IEC 17025: accreditation costs in a Brazilian public university

Abstract

ISO/IEC 17025 is an international standard that specifies the general requirements for evaluating the competence of laboratories involved in testing and calibration. This standard brings several benefits to university laboratories, which, thus, seek to obtain the accreditation. However, although cost is one of the main obstacles in this process; this topic has not been sufficiently studied. Since the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM) supports its laboratories for the implementation of this standard, it was chosen for this article to identify and quantify the accreditation costs of its laboratories that have obtained it or are working toward the goal. An exploratory literature review was carried out, and the data gathered were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. This study observed that the costs related to hours worked are linked to staff qualification and that high expenses in equipment and infrastructure occur in laboratories that receive financial resources from external providers.