The fundamentals of effective and consistent B-BBEE Verification is Impartiality. Allied Ratings (Pty) Ltd, and all its staff and associates will adopt a policy that ensures impartiality. Allied Ratings shall conduct business and act in a way that is considered as impartial in all aspects of the company.

In order to maintain and obtain confidence , Allied Ratings will always demonstrate that its decisions are based on objective evidence, accurate and professionalism  and that they are not influenced by other interest but shall comply with the highest standards of fairness, integrity and honest.

Allied Ratings will demonstrate commitment to impartiality in its B-BBEE Verification activities especially through its top management structures. Allied Ratings will have a publicly available statement regarding the importance of impartiality.

Allied Ratings will require personnel, internal and external, to declare any situation known to them that may present them or Allied Ratings  with a conflict of interest. Allied Ratings  will use the information to identify any impartiality and such personnel or the organisations that employs them will not use such personnel internally or externally unless they can demonstrate that there is no conflict of interest.

Allied Ratings  recognizes the following potential threats to impartiality and will continuously design and implement procedures to manage the risk involved.

• Self-interest threats – threats that arise from person or enterprise acting in their own interest for example financial self-interest.
• Self-review threats – threats that arise from a person or enterprise reviewing the work done by them.
• Familiarity (or trust) threats – threats that arise from a person or body being too familiar or trusting of another person instead of seeing evaluation evidence to base the verification conclusion on.
• Intimidation threats – threats that arise from a person or enterprise having a perception of being coerced openly or secretively, such as a threat to be replace or reported to a supervisor.

Any threat to impartiality e.g. intimidation threats, commercial or financial threats, that arises after the verification team has made an original declaration of impartiality must be reported immediately to the Managing Director of Allied Ratings s. The verification team member must report the threat telephonically, followed by a written report via e-mail. This report must be filed on the measured entity file. The verification team member involved will stop all work on the measured entity file immediately and leave the premises of the measured entity where applicable, until the Managing Director has resolved the threat by either:

• Addressing the matter with the measured entity and having subsequently removed the individual or circumstances that have created the threat to impartiality.

• Replaced the verification team member.

• Cancelled the verification engagement as per Allied Ratings terms and conditions

The independent approval of all verification shall be done by the Technical Signatory. The

Technical Signatory, as the person making the final verification decision, must be independent from the verification that is performed and may therefore not be an analyst on the same verification in which it acts as Technical Signatory or vice versa. Allied Ratings staff will report any impartiality or conflict of interest issue to the Managing Director or, General Manager, Operations Manager or Technical Signatory depending on the phase of the verification.