Mauritius
Mauritius Accreditation Service
MAURITAS
MAURITAS is Mauritius's only ILAC MRA-signatory accreditation body listed in this backbone.
MAURITAS's founding statute (the Mauritius Accreditation Service Act 1998) creates it as a government department with a 'national unified service' mandate — but the Act's own text never uses the word 'sole' or 'only'. The claim that MAURITAS is Mauritius's 'sole national authority' for accreditation comes only from the body's own website, not from the statute.
How this body's authority is structured
A government department, not an independent legal entity — established directly by the 1998 Act
Section 3(1) of the Mauritius Accreditation Service Act 1998 (Act 23 of 1998, in force 1 August 1999) reads: 'There is established for the purposes of this Act a department within the Ministry responsible for the subject of industry, to be known as the Mauritius Accreditation Service (MAURITAS).' Unlike ANAB (a private non-profit subsidiary) or Accredia (a designated non-profit association), MAURITAS is a department run by a Director who is, under section 3(2), 'a public officer', 'appointed by the Public Service Commission', and 'responsible to the Minister for the proper discharge of his functions'. Its staff are public officers under section 3(4). The Act's six statutory functions (section 4) include providing 'a national unified service for the accreditation of conformity assessment bodies' and establishing mutual recognition agreements with other accreditation bodies — but the Act does not use the word 'sole' or 'only' anywhere in its text.
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'Sole national authority' is MAURITAS's own description, not the statute's wording
MAURITAS's own 'About Us' page states: 'MAURITAS is the sole national authority in Mauritius for granting accreditation to conformity assessment bodies involved in calibration, testing, inspection and certification.' This sentence does not appear in the 1998 Act itself — independently confirmed by reading the Act's full eight-page text on the official Laws of Mauritius portal and, separately, on MauritiusLII, neither of which contains the words 'sole' or 'only' in connection with MAURITAS's status. The exclusivity claim is institutional self-description resting on the Act's 'national unified service' functional mandate (section 4(a)), not a direct statutory designation.
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Search the register: four categories, no login, with a separate suspended/withdrawn list
MAURITAS's public directory ('List of Accredited Entities', at entities.php) needs no login. It is not a keyword search tool but a categorised, browsable directory organised under four headings: Testing Laboratories, Medical Testing Laboratories, Calibration Laboratories, and Certification Bodies — each row linking to a downloadable PDF certificate and, where available, the accredited body's own website. The register keeps separate pages for suspended and withdrawn accreditations, a transparency feature not every national register offers.
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International recognition: several scopes, several dates, and unresolved discrepancies between sources
MAURITAS became an ILAC Full Member and MRA signatory for testing and calibration (ISO/IEC 17025); MAURITAS's own site dates this 4 October 2018, while ILAC's own news page dates the same event 5 October 2018 — a one-day discrepancy neither source resolves. On the IAF side, MAURITAS has been an IAF member since 2000 and its own site lists IAF MLA recognition for Quality Management Systems certification (17 October 2018) and Food Safety Management Systems certification (5 November 2020); IAF's own (now-archival, since 1 January 2026) member record additionally lists Certification of Persons and Validation and Verification among MAURITAS's recognised scopes, which MAURITAS's own current page does not — the two extra scopes are not claimed here. Regionally, MAURITAS's own site separately claims AFRAC signatory status (Testing and Calibration and QMS from 25 September 2018, FSMS from 17 July 2020, Information Security Management Systems from 13 February 2026) and SADCA (Southern African Development Community Cooperation in Accreditation — distinct from the SADCAS accreditation body used by smaller SADC economies) recognition — though MAURITAS's own site gives two different SADCA dates on two different pages ('14 March 2019 / 7 August 2020' on one page, 'accredited in July 2014' on another), a same-site contradiction recorded but not resolved this round. Neither AFRAC's own member registry nor SADCA's own site could be independently cross-checked: AFRAC's page loads but the actual membership list sits behind a SharePoint sign-in wall, and SADCA's page loads but its member table does not render at all — so the AFRAC/SADCA dates rest on MAURITAS's own account only.
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How to verify a certificate instead
Memberships and mutual recognition
- ILAC MRA signatory
What this body's recognition means
This body is one of Global ACI's ILAC MRA-signatory bodies, a status that carried forward when IAF and ILAC merged on 1 January 2026; IAF MLA and ILAC MRA marks stay valid through the transition period running to December 2028. What that recognition means →
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This page is for information only; it is not legal advice. It records what an accreditation body publishes about itself and does not accredit, certify or endorse any organisation.