Credit Rating Services Act, 2012 (Act No. 24 of 2012)Board NoticesCredit Rating Agency RulesPart IV : Quality and Integrity of Credit Ratings9. Integrity of the rating process |
| (1) | A credit rating agency and its employees may not, either implicitly or explicitly, give any assurance or guarantee of a particular rating prior to a rating analysis being undertaken and completed. This does not preclude a credit rating agency from developing prospective assessments used in structured finance instruments and similar transactions. |
| (2) | A credit rating agency must record all instances where in its credit rating process, it departs from existing credit ratings prepared by another credit rating agency with respect to underlying assets or structured finance instruments and must provide a justification for the differing assessment. |
| (3) | When methodologies, models or key rating assumptions used in credit rating activities are changed a credit rating agency must— |
| (a) | immediately, using the same means of communication as used for the distribution of the affected credit ratings, disclose the likely scope of the credit ratings to be affected; |
| (b) | review the affected credit ratings as soon as possible but by no later than six months after the change and in the interim, place those ratings under observation; and |
| (c) | re-rate all affected credit ratings that have been based on those methodologies, models or key rating assumptions. |
| (4) | A credit rating agency must notify a rated entity at least one business day prior to issuing or revising a credit rating, and— |
| (a) | inform the rated entity of the critical information and principal considerations upon which a rating will be based and afford the rated entity an opportunity to clarify any likely factual misperceptions or errors or other matters that the agency should be made aware of in order to produce an accurate rating; and |
| (b) | duly evaluate the response from the rated entity. |