Data assessment service

Workshops are planned (September in Auckland; October in Palmerston North and Wellington) for those people who have indicated an interest in being accredited risk assessors under the ACVM Act in order to progress the setting up of the Data Assessment Service. The workshops will introduce intending independent assessors to the decision model that will be used to assess applications, and will work through some practical examples.

Following the workshops, the ACVM Group intends to work with the data assessors and to forward work to them to do the data assessment component under contract to MAF. ACVM Group technical staff will undertake the review and evaluation function.

This move follows several months of in-house trials where we have split packages so that the data assessment and review and evaluation functions are undertaken by different staff. There have been a number of changes made as a result of this trial and we expect that there will be further refinements at the next step in the process.

Similar, shorter workshops are being held in Auckland and Wellington to familiarise applicants with the decision model that will form the basis for development of applications in future.

In conjunction with these workshops there will be ‘clinics’ for companies to bring issues to us for discussion, on a one-to-one basis.