Accreditation is a quality assurance mechanism which assesses either the capacity of an institution to propose an academic program or the quality of an academic program before its launch. Accredited institutions and programs are permitted to enroll students, both fee-paying and non-fee-paying. The result of an accreditation exercise will therefore have notable implications for an institution’s reputation and finance. Institutions are normally informed of the result via an accreditation report, a genre whose discourse is intrinsically interesting and notable, and thus merits fuller research attention, for two reasons: (1) the genre includes evaluations and comments which can be negative and face-threatening, and (2) the accreditation team, as we can safely assume, will do facework subsequent to the performance of face threats through the negative evaluations and comments. This inquiry tries to obtain a better comprehension of the lexicogrammar of this genre in general, and the lexicogrammar employed to textualize facework in particular by assaying the discourse of 30 accreditation reports in an Australian context. This article asserts that the evaluative language employed in this genre can serve to perform facework for both the institution being accredited and the accreditation team itself, and have considerable implications for both the workplace and classroom.