Oxebridge has appealed a response Intertek gave regarding a complaint filed for conflicts of interest. As you may recall, we filed a complaint against Intertek for hiring Ali Knapp as both President of People Assurance and the consulting wing, Intertek Alchemy. The complaint then revealed how Intertek conflates the consulting offerings with its ISO certification services.
In its response, Intertek invoked a super-magical-invisible “risk assessment” that, they claim, means they don’t have any conflicts of interest. This is a common trick by CBs, since they can just say they did a risk assessment, but never actually produce any records of it. As usual, Intertek did just that, and failed to provide any proof of this amazing, magical, get-out-of-jail-free card.
Then, Intertek claimed a bunch of things that appear to be outright false on their face. They claimed that Intertek Business Assurance and consulting services like Alchemy are “separate legal entities,” and that they don’t market each other or share any management. The problem here is that neither of those claims appear to be true. While Intertek may have divided itself into silos or different LLCs, etc., they all answer to the same Intertek Group, led by CEO Andre LaCroix and a single Board of Directors. Then, at least a decade of online publications by Intertek show — over and over — how those various silos all answer to that same company leadership and share Intertek-level organizational goals. They market them all as part of a single organization.
There’s also the problem with the fact that the various Intertek websites absolutely do cross-market their services. In fact, Intertek has branded all their services under a single branding, called “TQA”, and they are very, very clear that this includes Alchemy, People Assurance, and the ISO certification services provided by Business Assurance.
It’s a bit up in the air if Knapp herself has any role in certifications, so we might have been wrong on that front. Fair enough, but Intertek’s response was so egregiously false on the issue of conflicts of interest, we can’t be sure. The questions about conflicts of interest remain in play.
I’ve filed a massive appeal with Intertek, tearing apart their defenses. It’s an 11-page monster, and it includes example after example of how Intertek combines the marketing of its consulting services with its certification services. Like this:
And this:
And this:
You get the idea.
Intertek is basing its defense on the idea that you should know you are reading the websites of different companies just because one has a URL of “intertek.com/assurance” and another has the URL of “intertek.com/knowledge-education.” I am not sure a regular reader reads the literal text of a URL string and could make that inference.
Worse, when they do create separate websites, like “alchemysystems.com,” these just link back to “intertek.com” anyway, making it all moot. The entire Intertek family of offerings is clearly marketed as a single package of solutions, each interacting with the others.
Finally, Intertek bungled its complaint response by essentially admitting to at least one violation in the very sentence where they tried to disprove the allegation. They wrote that a “press release from 2018 doesn’t connect Alchemy with any certification services, last paragraph of the press release is a description of the Intertek ATIC solutions,” but failed to realize the “C” in “ATIC” stands for certification. Multiple official annual reports, websites, and CEO speeches clearly state that Intertek’s certification services provided by Business Assurance are included in the ATIC branding. Awkward.
There’s no way that Intertek can put this much toothpaste back into the tube. But because they pay accreditation bodies so much money, there’s likely no way ANAB or any of those oversight bodies will force them to. So this becomes, instead, an exercise in seeing just how the various bodies will collude to get Intertek out of this jam, while allowing them to continue to violate ISO 17021-1 at will.
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
