Taipei City Government

The fire forensic science laboratory of Taipei city fire department had become the first laboratory in Taiwan to attain ISO/IEC 17025:2018 certification in forensic science testing field on November 12^th this year. ISO/IEC 17025, an international standard to regulate lab activities and quality management, was announced renewal in last November introducing risk-based thinking, and that is through identification, evaluation, improvement, and prevention to undermine the possible risks of lab activities to achieve risk management purpose.
The fire department announced that after obtaining Accreditation for Fire Debris Identification since 1997, the fire forensic science laboratory continuously refined its functions and received two other international accreditations for Fire Debris Analysis and Hydrocarbon Fuels Analysis in 2015. This year, it surpassed other laboratories in obtaining this renewed standard by applying risk and opportunity concepts to laboratory activities and preventing false-positive and false-negative results for better validity. Besides, in order to efficiently enhance the lab quality management and technical level, the lab not only hosts educational trainings, internal audits and panel reviews for rolling correction but establishes the warning mechanism by setting upper and lower bound of qualitative measurements. By regularly checking quality control charts in response to meet the TQM standard, it doubly assured the reliability and validity of analyzing results.
The fire department announced that the committee of Taiwan Accreditation Foundation (TAF) had initiated the on-site evaluation in September 2018 and endowed the lab with the renewal accreditation on November 12^th. Nowadays, society tends to put more emphasis on scientific crime-solving techniques with scene investigation, and evidence collection and analysis, which should all correspond to the standard operation process to enhance evidence capability and credibility. In addition, the success of obtaining ILAC-MRA certificate and keeping pace with international counterparts undoubtedly awarded with great recognition of the lab analyzing ability. Prospectively, the fire department will cultivate professionals, enrich investigation equipment and refine evidence analyzing techniques, so to continuously elevate the lab quality level, implementing scientific investigation, accurate result, and specialized analysis, to showcase determination of protecting social welfare.