Review, reassessment and appeal at each designated ECA organisation — four routes, four deadlines, and one that is free

If your ECA comes back saying something you did not expect, what you can do about it depends entirely on which organisation issued it. One reviews errors free for a full year. Two charge $200 and refund it only if the outcome actually changes. One runs a two-stage process that ends with an external consultant reporting to a management committee. On the fifth organisation’s site we could not find a published review or appeal policy at all on 3 September 2026.

None of these routes is a way to argue that your qualification should be treated differently. Every one of the four published routes is a check that the organisation applied its own current policy correctly. That distinction is the whole of this page.

The four published routes, side by side

	What it is called	Who decides	Deadline	Fee
ICES	Request for review	ICES reviews the file and “will provide an updated evaluation report if we feel the necessary changes are warranted”	“All applicants have one year to request a review of the assessment if they feel there are errors or an inaccurate result”	Free within one year. “After one year there is a $75 to re-open the file”
IQAS	Reassessment	“an IQAS assessor who was not involved in the original decision”; “All reassessment requests are decided upon based on IQAS policy and guidelines”	“within one year of the date that the original assessment decision was issued”; decision emailed “within 30 business days”	$200, “automatically refunded only if the reassessment results in a change from the original assessment decision”
ICAS	Written review, then formal appeal	Stage 1: “A member of the Assessment and Research team will review your Assessment Report to ensure it is consistent with current policies.” Stage 2: “An external consultant will then review your documents and forward a report to the Committee for consideration at its next meeting.”	“within one year of the date on which ICAS issued the report”	Stage 1 free; formal appeal $200, refunded if successful
CES	Review, then ECA Decision Appeal	Review “by the assessor and/or peer reviewers”, then an Appeal Panel	Error report within 30 days of issue; appeal “within 90 days of the date on your report”	$199, “fee refundable if appeal is successful”
WES	Not found	—	—	—

On WES we read the ECA page, the fees page, the processing-times page, the FAQ index and the full Terms and Conditions, and found no published review, reassessment or appeal procedure for an ECA. We are recording that as “not obtained”, not as “does not exist”. What the Terms and Conditions do say is the reverse-facing discretion: “WES reserves the right to refuse to prepare an evaluation report for any reason, in its sole and absolute discretion.”

What a review is explicitly not for

IQAS publishes the clearest statement of the limits, and it reads as a list of the four things applicants most often try:

“A request for reassessment cannot be used: to ask for an exception to IQAS assessment criteria; to submit new academic records or credentials; for concerns related to your assessment certificate, such as spelling errors or incorrect personal information.”

It also sets the standard the request has to meet — it must “demonstrate that an error was made in the original assessment decision such as, comparative level of achievement or credentials not assessed by IQAS” — and closes the obvious workaround: the request must “contain the same academic records that were submitted with your original application – any new academic records will not be admissible in the reassessment.”

ICAS and CES describe the same boundary in different language. ICAS: “ICAS assessments are based on policies developed and approved by our Management Committee”, and the stage-1 review checks that the report “is consistent with current policies”. CES’s own terms state that its ECAs “are based upon established and current CES policies approved by the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies Comparative Education Service Management Committee”, and that its review process “is exhaustive, and its decisions are final”.

Read together: a review asks “did this organisation follow its own rule?”, never “is this rule the right rule?” Whether the rules should agree with each other is a different question, and the national framework these organisations work under says in terms that it “respects the autonomy of organizations; and is not prescriptive.”

Three procedural traps

The deadline runs from the report, not from when you noticed

Two of the four deadlines start on the date of issue. CES’s shorter clock — 30 days to report an error — will usually have expired before an Express Entry profile has produced anything. If you intend to challenge anything, read the report the week it arrives.

Reassessment is capped, and cancellation forecloses it

IQAS: “You may only submit one request for reassessment per application”, and “If your application was cancelled prior to ‘in-line’ status, it is not eligible for reassessment and will not be re-opened.” That second sentence matters because a cancellation is precisely what happens when an application falls outside an agency’s published scope — and the fee is not returned either.

A “correction” is not the same as a review

IQAS separates them explicitly: spelling errors and wrong personal details go through the contact form, not the $200 reassessment. ICES separates them the other way round, treating both under a single free one-year window. If you want a name corrected, do not pay for a reassessment.

The clause almost nobody reads: the result can change without you asking

Three of the five reserve the right to revisit a report they have already issued.

ICES: “ICES reserves the right to revise or amend the details of the evaluation report if we find a revision is necessary due to incorrect or inaccurate information obtained at the time of completion.” And, more broadly: “education is a dynamic entity and ICES completes evaluations based on the information we have at the time of completion. As our reports are advisory in nature, we reserve the right to change, update or rescind the results of any evaluation at any time.”

CES, on renewing an expired ECA: “Your assessment outcome may change to reflect current CES policy. If it does, the new (renewed) report will supersede the previous report.”

ICAS, on renewal: “Your file will be reviewed to confirm that the documents previously received and the assessment are consistent with current policies. You will be notified by email if additional documents are necessary or if there may be changes to the report.”

This is the sharpest practical consequence of the five-year validity rule. A renewal is not a reprint; it is a re-application of today’s policy to yesterday’s documents. The expiry mechanics are set out in five years from the date of issue.

Where the burden of proof sits, and why that is not a lever

The Lisbon Recognition Convention, which Canada ratified on 13 June 2018 and which took effect for Canada on 1 August 2018, frames recognition around “substantial difference”, and the national information centre summarises two of its principles: recognition “should be granted unless a substantial difference can be demonstrated”, and “The burden of proof lies with the organization responsible for recognition of the credential and/or qualification, and not with the individual.”

That is a real and quotable principle. It is also not, on its own, an appeal ground at any of the four organisations that publish one, because every published route is scoped to the organisation’s own policies rather than to the Convention. If you cite the Convention in a reassessment request, cite it alongside the specific policy you say was misapplied — not instead of one.

What to do with this

1. Read the report in the week it arrives, and check the four things a review can actually fix: the credential assessed, its stated length, the level assigned, and whether a credential you paid to have assessed was omitted.
2. Check the deadline for your specific agency before anything else, because two of the four run from the date of issue and one of those is 30 days.
3. Do not send new documents with a review request unless the agency’s own page says it will accept them; at IQAS they are inadmissible by rule.
4. If the disagreement is about the rule rather than its application, a review will not reach it. The realistic options are a different designated organisation for a fresh application at full price, or a further qualification — and the second of those is a decision about education, not about paperwork.
5. Budget for the possibility that a renewal changes the answer, particularly if you are relying on a report issued several years ago.

What this page does not do

It does not predict whether a review would succeed, it does not advise which organisation to apply to, and it does not evaluate whether any organisation’s policy is correct. Where a policy could not be read from an organisation’s own page, this page says so rather than filling the gap.