One of the responsibilities of our Compliance and Investigation team is to deal with companies that misuse the SIA logo and/or falsely claim to be Approved Contractors.

• The SIA logo and the ACS accreditation mark are certification marks owned by the Security Industry Authority. They must not be reproduced, copied, imitated, wholly or in part, or used in any way without the express permission of the SIA.
• In addition, Section 16 of the Private Security Industry Act 2001 makes it an offence for a company to claim it is an Approved Contractor when it is not; this includes indirectly claiming to be an Approved Contractor by displaying the ACS accreditation mark. The penalty for committing an offence under Section 16 is a fine of up to £5,000.

Advice on who may use elements of the SIA brand and how they should do so is available from this page.

A majority of SIA logo or ACS accreditation mark abuse cases are resolved before we need to consider prosecution - in fact, we aim to resolve 80% of cases within 30 working days*.

The following table is updated every month and may not correctly reflect the current position. Information presented covers the period 1 April 2008 (the beginning of our financial year) to 30 June 2008.

Figures for the period 1 April 2007 to 31 March 2008 (the previous financial year) are shown below.

*The 30 days starts when we are first made aware of the abuse.