The Asset Owner's Due-Diligence Checklist for NDT Contractors

You Are Buying a Records System, Not a Crew

The asset owner selecting an inspection contractor is buying two things at once: technicians who can find flaws, and a records system that will still stand up when a regulator, an insurer or an opposing expert reads it four years from now. The first is straightforward to assess on site during a trial job. The second stays invisible until it fails, and it fails at the worst possible moment, with the scaffold down and the survey window closing.

Contractors understand this asymmetry. A bid gets won on day rate and crew availability, and the documentation deficit surfaces only when reports arrive incomplete, when a technician's certification turns out to have lapsed mid-campaign, or when a surveyor declines to accept thickness readings from a supplier who is not approved for the service. Each of those costs the owner equipment availability while costing the contractor nothing that appears on an invoice.

Nine documents, requested before award and produced within one business day, close most of that gap. The documents themselves matter. The response time matters more, because it measures whether an operating system exists or whether somebody is assembling a package in reaction to your email. Both signals arrive from a single request that takes ten minutes to send.

Document One: The Written Practice

ASNT Recommended Practice No. SNT-TC-1A places the burden of qualification and certification squarely on the employer. The employer prepares a written practice describing how its personnel are trained, examined, certified and recertified, and that document is kept on file and approved by the employer's Level III. Every technician certificate the contractor issues derives its authority from that one document, which makes it the first thing to read and the fastest thing to test.

Ask which edition the written practice follows, whether it has been revised since, and whether the Level III's signature appears on the approval page. Ask whether it states the recertification interval and the training and experience hours required per method and per level. A contractor who cannot produce the written practice inside a day is issuing certificates with nothing behind them, and a written practice review will establish that in an afternoon.

Documents Two and Three: Certification Records and Vision Currency

Request the certification record for each named technician being mobilised, not a company-wide statement of capability. The record should show the method, the level, the issue date, the expiry date, the written practice it was issued under, and the printed legal name and signature of the designated Level III who verified the candidate's qualifications. Where the written practice separates the Level III from the certifying authority, both signatures belong on the record.

Vision runs on its own clock and lapses independently of the certification. SNT-TC-1A calls for near-vision acuity verified annually, to Jaeger Number 1 or equivalent at not less than 12 inches, plus a colour contrast differentiation check on the interval the written practice sets. A lapsed vision record undermines the technician's ability to perform the examination regardless of what the certification card says, and it is a currency failure that routine audits find repeatedly.

Document Four: A Named, Qualified Level III

Behind every credible NDT programme is one named person with the technical authority to write and approve procedures, resolve interpretation disputes, and stand behind the certifications the company issues. Ask who that person is, which methods their qualification covers, and whether they are an employee or an external appointment. Both arrangements work in practice. What does not work is a programme where nobody in the organisation can name them without checking.

Test the answer rather than filing it. Put a scope-specific technical question to the Level III during bid clarification: how they would establish sensitivity on a particular geometry, or which acceptance table governs your service condition. A Level III who engages with the question is real. An outsourced Level III arrangement is entirely legitimate, provided the person is named in the written practice, contactable, and available when a dispute lands mid-shift.

Document Five: The Examination Procedures

Every method in the scope needs a written, revision-controlled procedure approved by the Level III and demonstrated where the referencing code requires demonstration. Ask for the procedure list with revision numbers and approval dates, then compare it line by line against the methods and configurations in your scope of work. A gap between the two is a contractor who intends to write the procedure after award, or to work without one and hope nobody asks.

The procedure set is also what makes the reports defensible downstream, because ASME Section V requires the procedure identification and revision to be recorded on the examination record itself. A contractor without controlled revisions cannot populate that field truthfully, which is the first of the report defects that get packages returned and the one that generates the most rework on a large campaign.

Document Six: Equipment Calibration Records

Request calibration certificates for the instruments, blocks and reference standards that will be used on your campaign, then check the serial numbers against the serial numbers that will appear on your reports. ASME Section V requires the instrument and search unit identification, including manufacturer's serial numbers, to be recorded on the examination record. The traceability chain either closes on paper or it does not, and it is faster to check before award than after rejection.

Check due dates against campaign dates rather than against the award date. A reference block certificate expiring mid-turnaround invalidates every reading taken after it lapses, and the discovery happens on review, after the unit is back in service. Ask what the contractor does when a calibration lapses mid-campaign. A real programme has a documented answer involving recall, notification and re-examination of affected work.

Documents Seven and Eight: Insurance and Third-Party Approvals

Require a certificate of insurance naming your entity as additional insured, covering commercial general liability, automobile liability, workers' compensation and employer's liability, and professional liability or errors and omissions for the inspection opinion itself. Where radiography is in scope, confirm the policy does not exclude radioactive contamination. Match the effective dates to the campaign dates, and re-request the certificate if the campaign extends past expiry.

Approvals must match the asset. IACS Unified Requirement Z17 governs class society approval of service suppliers performing thickness measurement and in-water survey work on ships. The society issues a certificate of approval stating the type and scope of services and any limitations or restrictions, including equipment types where that is a constraint, and it holds the supplier responsible for qualifying and training its personnel to a recognised standard. Confirm the service supplier approval covers your service and the society attending your survey.

Nadcap accreditation applies to aerospace NDT processing and carries a readable signal in its own audit cycle. The initial audit accredits for 12 months, and the following two reaccreditations run 12 months each. Extension to 18 months requires no non-sustaining corrective actions, no verification-of-corrective-action audits and no Type C auditee advisories since the previous audit. A 24-month interval requires two consecutive prior accreditations of at least 18 months, which means a supplier holding one has an unusually clean history.

Document Nine: A Sample Report From Live Work

Ask for a redacted report from recent work in your industry, not a marketing sample built for a brochure. Read it the way a reviewer would read it. Does it carry the procedure number and revision? The instrument and calibration block serial numbers? The technician's name, level and certification reference? The acceptance criteria with code, edition and clause? A per-indication comparison against those criteria, signed and dated by whoever made the call?

A contractor whose standard output carries all of that will not generate rejections on your account. A contractor whose sample is a photograph and a paragraph of narrative will generate them from the first campaign onward, and every one of those rejections costs you equipment availability while costing them only rework hours. The sample report is the cheapest predictive test in the entire evaluation.

The Questions That Separate a Programme From a Paperwork Exercise

Four questions do most of the work. Who is your Level III and which methods does their qualification cover? Which edition of SNT-TC-1A is your written practice written to, and when was it last revised? What happens when a technician's certification or vision record lapses mid-campaign? Show me the certification and vision records for three named technicians you intend to mobilise, by tomorrow morning.

Response time is the measurement, not the content of the answers. A contractor running a live records system answers all four within minutes, pulling from a database that already exists because their own quality system depends on it. A contractor running a paperwork exercise asks which technicians you mean, then goes quiet for a week. Nothing else in a bid evaluation yields that much signal for that little effort.

Owners who want the evaluation done independently, or who inherited a contractor and need to know what they actually have, use a structured NDT programme audit and gap assessment against the codes their contracts invoke. Vessel owners with class attendance coming should also confirm UTM operator qualification and class approval before the survey window opens. Send the scope and the gaps come back as a document, not an opinion.

Request a consultation