Cost of verification

Each State Party shall meet the costs of destruction of chemical weapons it is obliged to destroy. It shall also meet the costs of verification of storage and destruction of these chemical weapons unless the Executive Council decides otherwise. If the Executive Council decides to limit verification measures of the Organization pursuant to paragraph 13, the costs of com-... 

A decision on the request shall be taken by the Conference at its next session, on the recommendation of the Executive Council. Any extension shall be the rrrinimum necessary, but in no case shall the deadline for a State Party to complete its destruction of all chemical weapons be extended beyond 15 years after the entry into force of this Convention. The Executive Council shall set conditions for the granting of the extension, including the specific verification measures deemed necessary as well as specific actions to be taken by the State Party to overcome problems in its destruction programme. Costs of verification during the extension period shall be allocated in accordance with Article IV, paragraph 16. 

Costs of verification of the converted facility shall be allocated in accordance with Article V, paragraph 19. 

To facilitate decisions on the various outstanding questions pertaining to the costs of verification, the Technical Secretariat shall document by category and Member State all costs incurred related to inspections under Articles IV and V. For transparency purposes an initial report on this documentation will be made available to all Member States when the draft 1998 budget is taken up by the Executive Council. These records will be used to reconcile the final 1997 budget and to develop the 1998 budget once the issues concerning cost attribution are resolved... 

Further to this objective, the Technical Secretariat shall prepare a report to the Executive Council addressing the feasibility of accurately accounting for headquarters activity costs for cost of verification purposes, including a description of any additional resources required. 

Decides to apply the reimbursement criteria for 1998 as contained in the section entitled Costs of verification. Understanding for implementation of Article IV and Article V of the decision C-I/DEC.74 and subparagraph 2(c) of decision C-II/DEC. 17 and, with respect to salary ,... 

Decides that the use of on-site monitoring instruments at CW facilities, in particular in CWDFs, to reduce the costs of verification, could be applied, where consistent with the requirements for effective verification. 

C-II/DEC.17 Programme and Budget for 1998 and Working Capital Fund (extraet on cost of verification) 117... 

Manual ultrasonic testing offers the advantages of low equipment cost combined with the flexibility of the human operator to provide good access and complex scanning capability. However, a total reliance on the capabilities of the ultrasonic technician to visualise the physical situation leads to a number of drawbacks, including lack of accuracy and consistency of defect size and location measurements, lack of verification that the required scan coverage has been fully achieved, and lack of consistency in flaw classification. A further disadvantage is that the ultrasonic data is not permanently recorded there is therefore no opportunity for the data to be re-examined at a later date if required. 

Storage and receiving are activities that can greatly contribute to a safe and economic operation. It is here that quality control can be achieved at minimal cost. Label verification and other quality assurance measures can increase the confidence level that the correct chemicals have arrived, thereby potentially circumventing the use of wrong chemicals. Wrongly shipped chemicals can be returned to the manufacturer with minimal or no cost to the batch operation owner. As with all processes and activities it is of great importance to apply the principles of inherent safety, in particular the minimization and attenuation principles (CCPS G- 41). 

After a satisfactory verification film is produced, an assembly may be fabricated specifically for destructive inspection to validate that the verification film was accurate. This correlation allows the use of verification film rather than more expensive destructive inspection for future changes such as duplicate tool fabrication and tool or detail modification. Simple assemblies are usually not destructively inspected because of high confidence that the verification film is entirely representative of the expected bondlines. Complex or large parts may not be destructively inspected because of the cost of the details and assembly time. In these cases other means of validating the verification film are used. Meticulous pre-bond detail and post-bond assembly thickness measurements may be sufficient to prove bondline thickness control. Ultrasonic inspection and X-ray photography (discussed previously) may be sufficient to prove that details are in the correct places and bonds are good. 

While you may not rely entirely on these tools to accept product, the periodic calibration or verification of these tools may help prevent unnecessary costs and production delays. While usage and environment may assist in determining the frequency of verification hardware checks, these factors do not affect software. Any bugs in software have always been there or were introduced when it was last modified. Software therefore needs to be checked prior to use and after any modifications have been carried out, so you cannot predetermine the interval of such checks. 

If both the farms and the dairy are covered by a reliable control system, the everyday monitoring will take place at the optimal CCP at the farm and analysis of milk samples at the dairy will only be needed at low frequency for verification of the system (Principle 6). This will ensure that there are no antibiotic residues in the milk sold by the dairy, with minimal expenses for control. In fact, the most expensive item will be the cost of the unannounced inspections at the farms to monitor the integrity of the system. However, if not all the farms are covered by a sufficiently good control system, the dairy will have to add the extra costs of its own independent system, in order to be able to take responsibility for this quality aspect. So the main benefit of a supply chain-based system is that it provides full control at the lowest cost. The main drawback is that the more entities that are involved, the greater is the risk that one of them will experience a system failure and this can have disastrous consequences for all those other entities that rely on the defaulting entity for their product control. 

Quantitative RT PCR (qRT PCR) can be used to accurately determine the levels of messages within given preparations of RNA. qRT PCR thermocyclers provide rapid online detection and quantification of mRNA, however, the initial purchase cost and the cost of reagents may be prohibitive for some laboratories. Methods of semiquantitative RT PCR have been used and good descriptions of these techniques are available (Samhrook and Russell, 2001). However, the same cDNA populations should not be used for differential display reactions and verification that a potential differential display band represents a differentially expressed gene. For this reason, independent cDNA samples should be prepared if both the screening and verification methods rely on PCR. qRT PCR, therefore, should be used in conjunction with other methods to verify that a differential display band represents a differentially expressed gene. 

Standard reference material (SRM) for wavelength accuracy, stray light, resolution check, and photometric accuracy can be purchased from NIST. Certified reference materials (CRMs) which are traceable to NIST and recertification services can be purchased from instrument manufacturers and commercial vendors [12]. The cost of neutral-density filters and prefabricated standard solutions in sealed cuvettes can be substantial. When purchasing performance verification standards from a secondary supplier other than a national standard organizations such as NIST in the United States and National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the United Kingdom, make sure that the traceability of the standards are available in the certificates. The traceability establishes the relationship of individual results to the national standard through an unbroken chain of comparisons. 

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