Accreditation programs such as ICCA, assessment criteria, self-evaluation processes, and continuous improvement. Covers benefits of accreditation and maintenance requirements.
2
hours
0.2
CEUs
Administrative, Legal & Management
1.7.4
Accreditation programs such as ICCA, assessment criteria, self-evaluation processes, and continuous improvement. Covers benefits of accreditation and maintenance requirements.
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On-Demand Online
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Self-Paced
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Certification
Certificate of Completion
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Contact our support teamUnderstand accreditation standards and assessment criteria
Individual certification tells the public that a single inspector or plans examiner has demonstrated competence. Accreditation asks a different and larger question: does the *department as a whole* operate at a high standard? Building Department Administration puts it plainly — accreditation is an indicator of competence, and it is a way for building departments to achieve a high standard of excellence in code enforcement. Where ICC certification focuses on the individual, accreditation focuses on the organization: its legal authority, its procedures, its records, its quality systems, and its ability to deliver consistent service through staff turnover, growth cycles, and even disaster recovery.
The best-known program in this field is the International Accreditation Service (IAS) Building Department Accreditation program. Operational since early 2005, it was the first nationally recognized accreditation program for building departments, and it is administered by IAS, a subsidiary of the International Code Council governed by a board drawn from governmental building regulators. The principal governing document is the IAS Accreditation Criteria for Building Departments/Code Enforcement Agencies (AC251). Under that criteria document, a department seeking accreditation submits detailed information about its jurisdiction and operations — topography, population mix, types of construction, service goals, department budget and staffing levels, quality systems, and appeals processes.
Why pursue it? The Building Department Administration text lists the benefits at length, and they cluster into three themes. First, external validation: accreditation provides documented proof from an independent, internationally recognized body that the department operates effectively, maintains high standards, and offers enhanced life safety and property protection to the jurisdiction it serves. That independent verification carries weight with elected officials, the construction industry, insurers (the text notes the potential for lower insurance premiums based on fewer claims against the jurisdiction), and the public. Second, professional standing: accreditation sets a standard of excellence for the profession, raises the department's recognition within the construction industry and public sector, and makes the department more attractive to highly skilled employment candidates. Third — and in practice the most important — structured self-improvement: the process provides an opportunity to partner with code-enforcement experts who identify problem areas and recommend corrections, creates a plan for improvements, and establishes periodic evaluation that keeps the department effective over time.
That third theme deserves emphasis. A department gains most of the value of accreditation by *preparing* for it, whether or not a certificate is ever issued. The criteria function as a comprehensive business-process standard for a code-enforcement agency — a written description of what a well-run department looks like — and measuring your own operation against that standard exposes gaps that day-to-day operations never reveal.
A newly appointed building official inherits a department with experienced staff, a decent reputation, and almost nothing in writing. When a council member asks, "How do we know the department is doing a good job?", the honest answer is anecdote. The building official proposes pursuing IAS accreditation — not primarily for the certificate, but because the accreditation criteria give the department an external, credible yardstick. Even the act of requesting the program materials and reviewing the criteria begins to answer the council member's question: it converts "trust us" into "here is the national standard, here is where we stand against it, and here is our plan to close the gaps."
The most common mistake is treating accreditation as a plaque-on-the-wall exercise — assembling paperwork to pass an assessment rather than aligning actual operations with the standard. Assessors visit job sites and interview stakeholders precisely to catch this. A second mistake is assuming accreditation replaces individual certification; it does not — staff certifications, training, and continuing education are among the things the program examines. A third is underestimating scope: accreditation reaches budgeting, records management, technology, and customer service, not just technical code knowledge. The correction in each case is the same: read the criteria early, involve the whole department, and pursue conformance in practice rather than on paper.
Conduct department self-evaluation against accreditation benchmarks
The accreditation process begins with — and largely turns on — a comprehensive self-evaluation. Under the IAS program, the first step is completion of a self-evaluation checklist keyed to the accreditation criteria, and departments are given six months to complete and submit it. The Building Department Administration text observes that in most cases this is the first time a jurisdiction has ever documented its operating practices, and that completing the checklist itself identifies areas of needed improvement. This is the audit-yourself-first discipline: find your own deficiencies before an outside evaluator does, when the finding costs nothing and the fix is on your own schedule.
The self-evaluation goes well beyond jurisdictional data such as service-area size or inspector headcount. The assessment asks about service goals, budgets, and training, certification, and continuing-education programs. It asks about information technology, including the availability of wireless voice and data communications for field staff. Building officials must describe the department's plan-review tracking system and explain the number and type of rejections most frequently noted; they must describe inspection processes, how inspectors are monitored, documented error rates, procedures for overseeing approved fabricators, and the use of special inspectors. Notice the pattern: the program does not merely ask *whether* you review plans and perform inspections — it asks whether you can *demonstrate, with records,* how well you do them.
Conducting the self-evaluation honestly requires the department to build or verify several bodies of documentation:
The output of the self-evaluation is a gap analysis: a written comparison of the department's current state against each element of the criteria, with each gap assigned an owner, a corrective action, and a date. That document — not the eventual certificate — is the engine of the whole program.
A mid-size department begins the self-evaluation confident it will sail through; its inspectors are experienced and its permit counts are healthy. The checklist tells a different story. Plan review has no written procedure — two examiners follow different review sequences and issue correction letters in different formats, and the most common rejection types have never been tallied. Inspectors carry personal, unwritten checklists that vary from person to person, so the same house can pass with one inspector and fail with another. Training records exist only as certificates in personnel files, with no plan tying certifications to assigned duties. None of this was visible from the front counter, where service seemed fine. The self-evaluation converts these invisible inconsistencies into a concrete gap list the department can actually work.
The classic self-evaluation failures are dishonesty and delegation. A self-assessment completed by one manager, alone, describing the department as it wishes it were, produces a document the on-site team will dismantle — evaluators talk to staff and stakeholders and visit job sites. The correction is to involve line staff in answering the checklist and to treat every "we don't have that in writing" as a finding, not an embarrassment. A second failure is writing aspirational SOPs that don't match practice; align the two before the evaluation, in whichever direction is correct. A third is skipping the quality-assurance evidence — claiming plan reviews are checked without any sampling records to show it.
Implement improvement plans to achieve and maintain accreditation
Once the self-evaluation is submitted, the formal assessment follows a predictable arc: document review, on-site evaluation, findings and response, board decision, and ongoing surveillance. Under the IAS program, an assigned lead evaluator reviews the checklist and accompanying documents, after which an on-site evaluation team — typically three or four IAS-certified lead evaluators — visits the community. The team does far more than read files. Members visit construction sites to appraise the performance of the inspection process, and they talk with community stakeholders — realtors, developers, even homeowners — to establish the department's competence from the outside in. At the conclusion of the visit, the jurisdiction receives feedback on its conformance to the criteria. Within thirty days of receiving the jurisdiction's response to the evaluation report, the final report and recommendations go to the IAS Board Committee on Accreditation (BCA); upon approval, an accreditation certificate is issued. The BCA may approve with conditions, such as a follow-up evaluation within a stipulated period, and on-site reevaluation is required at least once every three years to verify continued compliance.
Two implications follow for the building official managing the process. First, findings are normal — the improvement plan is the point. When the team identifies nonconformances, the department's job is to respond with corrective actions that address root causes: not "we re-filed the missing records" but "we adopted a records-management procedure, assigned responsibility, and now audit compliance quarterly." Corrective actions should be specific, dated, owned, and verifiable, because a conditional approval means someone will come back and check. Second, accreditation is maintained, not merely achieved. The three-year reevaluation cycle means the department must institutionalize the disciplines that earned the certificate: periodic internal audits against the criteria, annual review of SOPs so documents track evolving practice, continuous training and certification planning, and a standing performance-measure dashboard (workload, efficiency, effectiveness, service delivery) reviewed by management on a regular rhythm.
This is, in qualitative terms, the same plan–do–check–act discipline found in formal quality-management systems: set service goals with stakeholder input, operate to documented procedures, measure results against the goals, and correct shortcomings openly. The Building Department Administration text makes exactly this connection — employees who work in an organization with a documented quality system coupled with a good performance-measurement plan contribute more efficiently and are better able to meet the community's expectations. The strength of the accreditation framework, as the text puts it, is that it gives the jurisdiction a comprehensive business-process standard — a way to keep looking at its operations, improve, and continuously set goals. Accreditation is not a one-time inspection of the department; it is a decision to run the department inside a permanent improvement loop.
A mid-size department's self-assessment surfaces two systemic gaps: plan-review practices that live only in the heads of two senior examiners, and inspection checklists that vary from inspector to inspector. The building official builds a one-year improvement plan. In the first quarter, the senior examiners draft plan-review SOPs by writing down their actual sequence, correction-letter format, and tracking steps; the department reconciles the two examiners' differences in a working session and adopts one documented process. In the second quarter, the inspection staff builds standard checklists by discipline, tested in the field and revised twice. The third quarter adds the check step: the plan-check supervisor begins monthly spot reviews of completed reviews, and principal inspectors begin unscheduled follow-up visits, with error trends logged. The fourth quarter closes the loop — results are reviewed against the department's service goals, the SOPs are amended where field experience proved them wrong, and the gap analysis is updated. When the on-site team arrives the following spring, the department is not performing for the evaluators; it is simply showing them how it now works.
The recurring implementation failures are cosmetic corrective actions (fixing the instance, not the cause), unowned action items ("the department will..." instead of a named person and date), and post-award drift — letting SOPs, training plans, and metrics go stale until the reevaluation panic two and a half years later. Departments also err by hiding shortcomings from evaluators; the process rewards transparency, since assessors exist partly to help identify problem areas and recommend fixes. The corrections: write root-cause corrective actions with owners and verification steps, calendar internal audits and annual SOP reviews as recurring obligations, keep the performance dashboard in front of management every month, and treat the evaluation team as expert peers rather than adversaries.
This course provides comprehensive professional development in building department accreditation programs, centered on the IAS Building Department Accreditation program — the first nationally recognized accreditation program for building departments — and its governing criteria for building departments and code-enforcement agencies. Participants learn why accreditation matters (independent validation of the department, not just its individuals; public and council confidence; potential insurance benefits), what accreditation programs examine (legal authority, staffing and certifications, training, documented procedures, records, quality systems, budgets, technology, and customer service), how to conduct an honest self-evaluation and gap analysis, and how to implement and sustain improvement plans through the on-site evaluation, board decision, and three-year reevaluation cycle. The throughline is that the self-assessment discipline and continuous-improvement loop deliver most of the value — a department that audits itself first, documents what it actually does, and measures quality, timeliness, and customer satisfaction is a better department whether or not the certificate ever hangs on the wall.