At their annual meeting held in Athens on November 2-4, the heads of the Oeko-Tex institutes confirmed the international company decided to continue with their internal policy on inspections, thanks to the success witnessed over the past year. Oeko-Tex general secretary Raimar Freitag said that next year certificate-holders would again be subjected to self-financing inspections of their products at a rate of at least 15% of all certificates issued worldwide. He added that the auditing of Oeko-Tex member institutes, which is essential for maintaining uniform testing standards, will now be carried out annually. Monitoring of Oeko-Tex licence-holders by an independent inspector from the Oeko-Tex Association has also proved successful, and so from this year a second auditor will be appointed so that production companies can be inspected on site even more regularly.

According to a statement from Oeko-Tex, the production audits that have been carried out so far have generally been welcomed by the certificate-holders and have proved highly constructive. Since taking up his post last December, the Oeko-Tex inspector has visited over 210 companies at all stages of the production chain, in 14 countries worldwide, and checked the validity of 313 Oeko-Tex certificates. While there were very few complaints in Europe, at nearly 50% of all companies in the Middle and Far East the auditor recommended re-testing. As a result of the audit that was carried out and the random samples that were taken as part of normal Oeko-Tex product checking, some companies had to have their existing certificate withdrawn. The main reasons were the use of non-declared dyes and incorrect preliminary products.

According to Mr Freitag, the increase in spot checks which was decided upon last year has been particularly worthwhile: "The increase in checks by half has meant that the failure rate for the period from July 2004 to June 2005 has fallen by 1.2% to 4.4% compared with the previous year." Last year, a total of 7,000 spot tests were carried out on certificated articles from the retail trade. That corresponds to a rate of 17.5% of all Oeko-Tex certificates that were issued worldwide and is about 61% higher than the previous year. Items from 39 production companies and 45 different product groups were inspected. The tests focused mainly on Oeko-Tex product classes I (30%) and II (69%), which reflects the general distribution of all Oeko-Tex certificates.