In a display of utter tone-deaf ignorance to how democratic societies and professional organizations work, current US TAG to TC 176 Chair Alka Jarvis has responded to address internal concerns over the recent TAG leadership elections by promising to consider revising ANSI TAG election procedures, but only after the election of her hand-picked nominees. Jarvis is now under scrutiny and an official TAG internal investigation as to why two Chair nominees she picked were included on the ballot, but not Boeing’s Alan Daniels, who was nominated by the membership but not personally approved by Jarvis.
Oxebridge had been publicly, and privately, calling on Jarvis to update the TAG election rules at least seven months prior to the election, and even laid out a simple language change that could be adopted quickly so that current elections could avoid any extreme delay. Jarvis ignored these calls, and pressed ahead with an election that is now the subject of the official appeal, as well as an FTC anti-competitive trade complaint and possible legal action.
It’s assumed that Jarvis never thought the members would pay attention to the North Korean model of elections that the TAG has implemented, where by current Chair hand-picks a successor, who then runs unopposed with competing candidates utterly disallowed. Oxebridge scuttled those plans by aggressively outing Jarvis and the TAG leadership on their abhorrent practices, and so Jarvis at least put two names on the ballot, those of Paul Palmes and Craig Williams. This gave the event an illusion of democracy, but competing candidates — such as Daniels — were still blocked from participating, and then the leadership took several steps to block any potential write-in candidacies. First, when members began emailing between themselves discussing possible write-ins, sources say the TAG leadership chastised them for communicating outside of official channels. Then, registrar rep George Hummel wrote a blast email to the membership complaining about inter-member communication, resulting in the TAG leadership pulling all membership information from even their internal SharePoint site; the TAG didn’t just delete member email addresses, they deleted all the member information, including their names. Now not only are the members prohibited from speaking to each other, they are effectively blocked from knowing who the other members are.
At the same time, Jarvis, along with ASQ Director of Communications Michael Barry, sent a Bizarro World email ignoring the offensive tactics by her leaders, and promising that the ANSI rules for TAG elections would be re-examined. Of course she did nothing prior to the election, so any such changes would only take effect during a future election, if she does anything at all.
In the past few weeks we have seen an increase in emails from TAG members regarding the approval of ISO 9001 FDIS and the leadership election. From these emails, we realize there is a need to update the TAG procedures to provide clear guidance and procedures for the approval of FDIS, nominations and campaigning.
Please know that we are committed to revising the TAG procedures to address the gaps that have caused some of the recent conflict. There are also plans to recommend revisions to the ANSI procedures. With this said, we appreciate your passion and dedication and look forward to your continued participation in the TAG.
That email was sent on October 6th, just a few weeks before the elections, but just one day after the Hummel email to members. Remember, Jarvis had been in the hot seat over the elections since April, but did nothing for that entire time, allowing her to see her flawed election to its conclusion. The email appears, to me anyway, as a way to shut the membership up.
Right now, though, Jarvis may be forced to call a new election anyway. The Oxebridge complaint alleges that the current election was fraudulent in that it allowed Jarvis to hand-pick her successor, and ensure that the majority of leadership roles remain in the consulting wing of the TAG, giving key consultants market advantage over other TAG members, and any non-TAG industry professionals. The allegation also claims that Jarvis failed to properly vet the eventual Chair winner, Paul Palmes, who apparently padded his resume by adding over 20 years of ISO experience he doesn’t seem to actually have. Palmes and Jarvis appeared just a few weeks after the event, alongside Hummel, at a pricey ASQ event on ISO 9001.
As of right now, consultants and registrars comprise 70% of the leadership positions and appointed slots, even though their numbers only comprise 49% of the membership. Palmes defended this arrangement in a public webinar where he sneered, “standards are made by those who show up.”
Per ANSI and ISO directives, the roles should be evenly split between six possible stakeholder types, meaning neither consultants nor registrars should ever comprise more than 17% of the membership, never mind a majority in the actual leadership. The other stakeholder types are companies (ISO 9001 user organizations), government agencies, individuals (typically non-consultant retired experts) and non-profit organizations.
It is unlikely that Jarvis, who seems to lack the ethical tuning required to even know there’s a problem afoot, will take the necessary actions to fix the TAG elections, even if they are blindingly simple. After all, she earned her slot by running unopposed as the hand-picked successor of Jack West, and refused to even speak to the membership about her vision of leadership until after her coronation election.
Now, because of the delay, the entire election is suspect, and needs to be cancelled. Palmes needs to step down as Chair-elect (and probably resign from the TAG entirely, since he appears to exhibit questionable ethical judgment), the election rules updated and new elections held. Had they taken my advice in April, they wouldn’t be in this mess.
ANSI, meanwhile, is continuing to throw up excuses as to why it can’t investigate the TAG nor take any action. That is a whole other comedy of errors which we will discuss soon.
Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 35 years’ experience implementing ISO 9001 and AS9100 systems, and helps establish certification and accreditation bodies with the ISO 17000 series. He is a vocal advocate for the development and use of standards from the point of view of actual users. He is the writer and artist of THE AUDITOR comic strip, and is currently writing the DR. CUBA pulp novel series. Visit www.drcuba.world
