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Assurance and Validation Procedure

13 February 2020

ICMM’s Assurance and Validation Procedure establishes company member requirements for independent assurance and validation.

While Sustainability Report Assurance has been the primary component of ICMM’s assurance procedure since 2008, starting in 2020 validation of performance expectation implementation at the corporate and asset levels (performance expectation validation) will be required. The expectation is that company members will disclose their validation activities on an annual basis.

Performance Expectation Validation

Assets subject to performance expectation validation include operations involved in the production or refining of minerals and metals over which the company member exercises control, with regard to financial and operating policies and practices. This excludes activities in a company’s portfolio that are not producing saleable products, such as exploration sites, non-managed operations, legacy properties and projects or non-managed joint ventures (JV). However, JV companies that are majority owned by ICMM members (either singly or jointly) are encouraged to implement ICMM’s membership requirements.

Performance expectation validation comprises the following elements:

  1. Self-assessment of all assets subject to validation (ie subject assets). First-party confirmation of the existence and integrity of systems and/or practices relating to implementation of the performance expectations, to the extent that they are applicable in a given context.
  2. Prioritisation of assets for third-party validation. The prioritisation process will follow clearly defi ned criteria chosen by the company and will include transparent disclosure of the selection process. The selection of assets may be based on a fixed percentage of assets, market-driven by virtue of commodities or geographies of particular concern (eg confl ict minerals), based on customer demands, or a mix of these and other factors.
  3. Third-party validation. Independent confi rmation of the reasonableness and authenticity of assertions made in self-assessments. This review may take place in conjunction with third-party work on a separate system, eg an ISO 14001 environmental management system audit.
  4. Disclosure. Members are required to disclose, publicly, their performance expectation validation activities on an annual basis. The disclosure can be made on a member’s website or in a sustainability or corporate report. The asset-by-asset disclosures that apply to self-assessments and third-party validations from 2022 onwards will provide clear line of sight to interested parties of the status of performance expectations implementation.

These validation activities are designed to effectively evaluate the implementation of the performance expectations individually. There is no overall outcome for a given asset. The possible outcomes for the validation of an individual performance expectation are 'meets',  'partially meets', and 'does not meet'. In some situations, the outcome may be 'not applicable'.

Third-party Validations must be conducted by qualified validation service providers (VSPs). VSPs are professional service providers and must meet ICMM requirements for independence, experience, expertise and lack of conflicts of interest. ICMM will keep a register of VSPs that members use. Members are required to disclose, publicly, their performance expectation validation activities on an annual basis. The disclosure can be made on a member’s website or in a sustainability or corporate report.