IQNet Just Advertised Consulting Services by its Certification Body Members

IQNet, a cabal of international certification bodies that has never once defined what it does exactly, has now started marketing the consulting services of its members. The problem is that IQNet’s members are ISO 17021-accredited certification bodies who are prohibited from providing consulting.

Here’s this post that popped up on LinkedIn today:

The link then takes you to this page, which lists a bunch of CBs who are definitely, absolutely prohibited from helping “organizations establish, implement, maintain and continually improve their” management systems.

There’s a long-running joke about how, for nearly ten years now, I have been asking anyone at IQNet, including its head, Pedro Castro Alves, what the organization actually does. It markets itself as a sort of pseudo-accreditation body, accepting CB members and saying that IQNet membership then ensures CB performance and cross-frontier recognition. That sounds exactly like what an AB is supposed to do, but IQNet isn’t an actual accreditation body. Instead, it seems to be a membership organization cooked up by Alves as a side hustle, to dupe CBs into paying him money for some really, really bad marketing.

Again, I have been asking Alves for nearly a decade to explain to me what IQNet does, and he’s refused. Ditto for anyone else who has posted about IQNet. Either they don’t know, or IQNet does exactly nothing.

I suspect it’s the latter.

You’d think Alves would know something about what accreditation means, but you’d be wrong. You see, Alves is as dumb as a bag of cabbage that’s been soaked in a bucket of anesthesia. But he sucks up to both ISO and IAF, so they let him have his fun and totally market his members to enable them to openly violate the rules of both organizations.

Doesn’t this all just instill confidence and trust in accredited ISO certification bodies?