We may be witnessing the end of accreditation as yet another certification body openly violates ISO 17021-1 and launches a consulting service.
Now it’s Bureau Veritas North America (BVNA), which has just announced its new “Management System Consulting Services.” The services include all of the offerings explicitly prohibited under 17021, such as performing internal audits and developing management system documentation. The services are then marketed on the very same webpage as BVNA’s certification services. It is unambiguous, overt, and explicit.
A PDF “ServiceSheet” then even lists a consulting email for BVNA.
They then supported that further with a LinkedIn marketing campaign.
The move appears to be global, as well. Last week I reported how Bureau Veritas in Myanmar and Thailand were found marketing consulting services alongside their certifications, as well.
IAF Refuses to Take Action
Since the original reporting on this, the IAF has formally refused to step in, of course. They are insisting that BVNA is not accredited. And hereis where things get strange.
Another company, Bureau Veritas Certification North America (BVCNA), is technically the company listed on ANAB’s scope of accreditation. This is what IAF is hanging its “Magical Hat of Inaction” on:
I spoke to a Business Development representative at BVNA, and got some unusual responses. First, he seemed to say he didn’t know anything about this decision to launch consulting services and that he had “asked the exact same question” I did about it. So even BVNA’s business development team seems to have been kept in the dark about it. I am not naming the guy, since I am pretty sure if anyone at any BV company found out he was answering my questions, he’d be fired.
Then he switched gears and insisted it was BVCNA that cannot offer consulting, implying (but not stating) that BVNA can. This is consistent with IAF’s stance.
Except it’s not that easy. BVCNA and BVNA are essentially the same company, playing games with corporate filings to get around the ISO 17021 rules.
Same Address, Same Management
First of all, both BVCNA and BVNA are operated out of the same Houston street address, and that is the one listed on the ANAB scope of accreditation. Here is the address for BVNA:
And the address for BVCNA:
Next, both companies have the same exact senior management team. Here are listings from official Texas records, showing Heather Bush, Laurent Croguennec, and Renato Catrib in top management roles. First is BVCNA, the body accredited by ANAB:
And here is BVNA, showing the same people in the same roles. Again, the addresses are identical, as is the registered agent:
Then there is the problem that BVNA and BVCNA have linked their services and sell them collectively under a single US Federal CAGE code:
And keep in mind, all of these companies fall under the global Bureau Veritas mothership organization, which has its headquarters in France.
Both Companies Caught Selling Both Services
All of this is moot anyway, since both websites of both companies offer both services.
In the CAGE code flyer above, you can see a sentence that says BVCNA (the accredited body) offers “implementation and maintenance” of the ISO standards. That means consulting.
Here is the BVNA website selling consulting and certification:
And here is the BVCNA website:
And here is the allegedly unaccredited side, BVNA, selling certification:
Bureau Veritas joins other fully-accredited CBs that have abandoned conformity with ISO 17021-1, such as LRQA, which purchased ISO 9001 consulting company Core Business Solutions, and Intertek, which pulled the same “shared management” stunt with its consulting wing. IAF and the accreditation bodies refused to take action in those cases, as well.
It now seems that to get around ISO 17021, all a company has to do is open another company with one word in the name changed, and that’s it. ISO 17021, meanwhile, says something different:
5.2.5 The certification body and any part of the same legal entity and any entity under the organizational control of the certification body shall not offer or provide management system consultancy.
As for the Bureau Veritas business development representative, he said I was getting his words “out of context,” but when I explicitly asked him to help me put them in context, he stopped responding.
UPDATE 18 December 2025: I rewrote this piece to better organize the information, to provide an update on IAF’s refusal to take action, and to add new corporate filing information on the two BV companies.
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
