Timber Legality Audits

Timber Legality Audits (TLA) from SGS provide a voluntary company-level approach to monitoring and verifying wood production. Find out more.

Timber Legality Audits (TLA) from SGS – providing a voluntary company-level approach to monitoring and verifying wood production.

It is now increasingly common for wood procurement policies to state a preference for products that are certified under Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) schemes.

However, the shortage of SFM-certified products on the international market has meant that procurement policies are often revised to incorporate stepwise approaches, or to broaden the definition of legal and sustainable timber. Many policies, such as the US Lacey Act and the coming EU Illegal Timber Regulation, now require timber products to be independently verified or certified so as to qualify as ‘legal’, ‘legal progressing to sustainable’ or ‘sustainable’.

Timber Legality Audits from SGS provide a voluntary, company-level approach that incorporates regular auditing or continuous monitoring and verification of a company’s wood production and tracking information.

The benefits of Timber Legality Audits

TLAs can help you:

• Demonstrate good governance
• Facilitate access to new markets in countries with import restrictions
• Prepare companies for more demanding schemes, such as the certification of sustainable forest management
• Help demonstrate legal compliance to national authorities and to financiers in due diligence processes

How does it work?

The Service consists of two main components:

• Legal Production (LP) – Provides independent assurance that timber products have been produced according to the relevant laws and regulations of a particular country. Our LP Standard can be completed in two stages: Verification of Legal Origin (VLO), followed by Verification of Legal Compliance (VLC)
• Chain of Custody (CoC) – Is a mechanism that ensures that no unverified or illegal wood enters the supply chain from the verified forest to the end consumer

Companies periodically audited against the SGS LP or CoC Standards are awarded with a 5-year Timber Legality & Traceability Verification (TLTV) Statement if they meet and maintain compliance with the Standard requirements. The TLTV Statement ensures that a timber product as been legally produced, transformed and sold throughout the supply chain.

TLAs potentially involve a combination of the following activities:

1. Verification of log/timber production and tracking data – involving review of timber tracking systems, from port back to stump, in legitimate forest concession
2. Auditing of company data and specific legality investigations and checks
3. Data monitoring and processing, information analysis and reporting

Since 2005, we have demonstrated our capacity to monitor and verify the timber supply chain in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. Currently 7.5 million hectares are TLTV-verified and 45 companies hold a TLTV-CoC Statement.

The TLTV LP/CoC Statements have been officially recognized in several importing countries as evidence of the legality of timber products for public procurement contracts, including Denmark (Ministry of the Environment, Forest and Nature Agency), France (Le Commerce du Bois), the Netherlands (Keurhout), and the United Kingdom (Central Point of Expertise on Timber).

To find out more about Timber Legality Audits from SGS, contact us today.

Is Your Timber Legal?Is Your Timber Legal?To improve transparency and accountability in the forestry sector. ...

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  Is Your Timber Legal?

  published 02/28/12

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