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What is TÜRKAK TBDS and How Can Your Inspection Firm Comply?
TÜRKAK — Turkey's national accreditation body — has introduced the Technical Document Verification System (TBDS) for documents issued by accredited bodies. The system enables digital verification of the authenticity of inspection reports, personnel certificates, and calibration documents. For NDT and inspection firms, this development represents both a compliance obligation and a significant opportunity for process standardization.
What is TBDS?
The TÜRKAK Technical Document Verification System (Teknik Belge Doğrulama Sistemi) is a central platform that allows digital verification of technical documents — inspection reports, test reports, calibration certificates — issued under accreditation scope. A QR code or reference number on the document lets the recipient confirm that it was genuinely issued by an accredited body and that its content has not been altered.
The system serves three core purposes:
- Preventing forged or altered inspection and test documents
- Digital traceability of accredited documents
- Easy verification of accreditation scope by clients and third parties
Which bodies are in scope?
The TBDS obligation covers all TÜRKAK-accredited bodies:
- Inspection bodies accredited under ISO/IEC 17020 (Type A)
- Testing and calibration laboratories accredited under ISO/IEC 17025
- Personnel certification bodies accredited under ISO/IEC 17024
Most NDT firms operate under ISO/IEC 17020 accreditation, making the TBDS obligation directly applicable.
Practical compliance steps for NDT firms
1. Review your document infrastructure
For TBDS to function, every document issued must be registered in the system and carry a unique reference (QR code or number). This requires your reporting and archiving software to either integrate with TBDS or at minimum produce compliant document output.
If you're still generating reports in paper, Word, or Excel, this transition point has arrived.
2. Digitize your reporting workflow
TBDS compliance makes a system that automates report generation and archiving essential. Every inspection report must:
- Carry a unique identifying number
- Be stored in the system in a tamper-proof form
- Produce output in a format that can be uploaded to TBDS
Meeting all three of these on a paper-based system is not possible.
3. Implement e-signature
To prove the authenticity of documents submitted to TBDS, e-signature is a critical component. Documents signed with qualified electronic signatures (QES) under applicable legislation become verifiable through the TBDS.
4. Bring personnel and equipment records into the system
A TBDS query looks not just at the inspection report itself, but at whether the relevant personnel held a valid certificate on the inspection date, and whether the equipment used was in calibration. Having these records in the system and up to date is essential — both for TBDS compliance and for any TÜRKAK accreditation audit.
Consequences of non-compliance
TÜRKAK may impose sanctions — including suspension or restriction of accreditation scope — on accredited bodies that fail to comply with TBDS. From the client side, the direction is also clear: a document that cannot be verified through TBDS will increasingly be questioned.
How NDT software simplifies TBDS compliance
Well-designed NDT management software covers most of the path to TBDS compliance automatically:
- Every report is created with unique numbering
- E-signature integration makes reports authentic and immutable
- Personnel certificate status is recorded in relation to the inspection date
- Equipment calibration status is verified by the system at each inspection
- All documents are stored in the archive in a searchable, accessible form
If you want to prepare your infrastructure for TBDS compliance, look at ceres-ndt's digital report management and e-signature integration. TBDS integration is on our roadmap; the existing infrastructure already covers most of that step. Contact us for details.