A common and expensive misunderstanding is that COR™ certification is finished once the certificate arrives. Under COR® 2020 in Ontario, certification runs on a three-year cycle with an annual obligation inside it. Employers who miss the annual internal maintenance audit can lose their letter of good standing, and that letter is often what a buyer actually asks to see. Here is how the cycle works, what evidence each year requires, and how to avoid the two failures we see most often: a maintenance audit submitted late, and a program that was never updated after the company changed.
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Year one is the certification year: your initial internal audit is followed by an IHSA-approved external audit, and a successful result earns COR™ certification
- 2
Years two and three require a successful annual internal maintenance audit, submitted before each certification anniversary, to keep your letter of good standing current
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The three-year cycle ends in year four, when you re-register and complete an external recertification audit to begin a new cycle
- 4
The external audit is required at recertification, roughly every three years, not annually, so do not budget for an external audit every year
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Buyers and pre-qualification platforms often ask for the letter of good standing rather than the certificate, so an expired letter can block a tender even when certification technically still exists
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Programs drift when scope, ownership, or site locations change; update hazard assessments, the training matrix, and organizational responsibilities before the maintenance audit, not during it
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Internal auditors must actually be trained and independent of the area being audited, and the auditor will check whether the process produced real findings
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Book the maintenance audit against your anniversary date, not your fiscal calendar, and keep a single evidence folder so records can be produced quickly
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