It’s a Thursday, so that probably means the folks at the ISO consulting company Core Business Solutions got themselves into another conflict of interest mess.
You may recall that Scott Dawson, the founder of Core, was called out by yours truly for falsely claiming he could get companies “certified” to ISO 9001 for “in four months for less than $5,0o0.” What Dawson meant was that the lowest-tier consulting package he had was five grand, but that didn’t include the cost of certification, which typically starts around $10k for a small company. I gave him a heads up to correct his marketing but he blocked me and kept at, for years, and continued to mislead folks.
Dawson was nevertheless rewarded with a seat on TC 176, but all signs indicate he never really did anything and just used the position to market his consulting practice.
We filed a complaint about the misleading stuff to Core’s certification body at the time, ABS-QE, but they dropped it without proper processing. Later, at some point. Dawson switched to NQA, and he still claims an ISO 9001 certificate from them.
Later, Dawson was caught appearing to claim his company was AS9100 certified, when it totally wasn’t. He just threw the logo on the Core website.
Then, Dawson wrongly claimed that AS9100 had issued a climate change amendment, when that never happened, either.
Fast forward, and Core was bought outright by the certification body LRQA, a direct conflict of interest. LRQA is accredited to ISO 17021-1 which says, “a 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.” We filed complaints on that with LRQA, who ignored them as part of the IAF’s recent move to block all complaints about anything, anywhere, all at once.
This means that now CBs can totally own consulting companies and certify their own work.
I then got quite a few emails from former Core employees, detailing all sorts of shenanigans, but I tend not to run stories on those. Disgruntled ex-employees are not the best sources, so I can’t base reporting on that stuff. But the pattern is troubling.
Anyway, Dawson wasn’t apparently happy to stop dipping his toes into conflicts of interest and decided to bellyflop right in and splash around like an annoying kid at a public pool.
Now, he’s spun off a new certification body to compete with the one he sold Core Business Solutions to. According to a spam mail sent by Stephanie Dawson-Kline — the current HR director of Core — she’s now also the CEO of CertFast LLC, a new certification body offering fast ISO 9001 certifications. CertFast is accredited to ISO 17021-1 by the International Accreditation Service (IAS).
According to Pennsylvania business records, Scott Dawson is president of both companies simultaneously. Both are listed as “active” as of 6 November 2025.
Remember, I said ISO 17021-1 says a CB cannot own a consulting company? I guess a consulting company can own a CB, though. And for reasons I can’t understand, the IAS accreditation for CertFast lists their HQ as being in New York, not Pennsylvania, but nowadays you can put whatever address you want on an accreditation cert and the ABs never check. It claims CertFast operates “virtually.”
So for those keeping track, the certification body LRQA now owns Core Business Solutions, which owns the certification body CertFast. Make sense?
The email and CertFast’s entire marketing machine violate ISO 17021, which says, “A certification body shall not state or imply that certification would be simpler, easier, faster or less expensive if a specified consultancy organization were used.” Their very name implies they are faster, and the rest of their stuff covers the other three bullets, suggesting they are easier, simpler, and less expensive. I mean, damn, their logo breaks the accreditation rules! Take a look:
Or this version, from their LinkedIn page:
Worse, the email was spammed to ISO consultants and invited them to give referrals to CertFast, thus ensuring violations of another rule in ISO 17021-1 which says, “the certification body shall take action to correct inappropriate links or statements by any consultancy organization stating or implying that certification would be simpler, easier, faster or less expensive if the certification body were used.” So, any consultant taking up CertFast on its spam offering will end up causing CertFast to break more rules.
But the fun stuff doesn’t end there. Not only did Dawson-Kline invite all sorts of ISO 17021-1 violations, she sent it using the Core Business Solutions email platform and their spam mail list. In the email, hovering over the link for “Certfast.com” shows that the list came from LRQA’s own Core email list!
This means that CertFast is using the mailing list of another company to compete with its own parent company.
Notice how Kline dropped her maiden name for the CertFast email, but it’s still very much included on her LinkedIn profile, in which she’s still listed as working for LRQA’s Core Business Solutions at the same time. Here is Kline posting just two months ago to promote Core, even though she was already working for CertFast.
It’s almost as if an HR manager might not know enough about how to run an ISO certification body.
Now, I am sure the parties all have flimsy excuses. Perhaps one division of LRQA bought Core, and a different division does the CB work, so on paper, it all looks fine. And maybe someone will argue it shows more impartiality, not less, that LRQA Core is marketing for a competitor, CertFast. None of that makes sense to any reasonable person, but I bet they’d offer up something like that to ensure the accreditation bodies can continue to get paid. There is no way IAS or UKAS are going to de-accredit either LRQA or CertFast if their checks continue to clear. Dawson knows this, which is why he gets away with it.
But we can trust Dawson! He’s on TC 176 and was a Baptist minister, so nothing could possibly be wrong here. I mean, he’s doing God’s work.
(I’ve reached out to both Core and CertFast, as well as LRQA, and will update the article if I hear back.)
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
