KSQA Was Suspended — TWICE — and Accreditation Body IAS Helped Cover It Up

So, I am furious and let this post reflect that. Ask my gastroenterologist: I have no more shits to give.

The certification body K&S Quality Assessments (KSQA), out of California, had its accreditation to issue AS9100 certificates suspended since January 5th, and never alerted any of its 200+ clients. The way we found this out was after checking into another scandal, and it was nearly by accident.

For a while, I had been recommending KSQA, but had to withdraw that recommendation after multiple clients reported that their staff, led by former Dekra auditor Kris Norlander, were not answering emails, responding to phone calls, uploading reports to OASIS, or processing NCs on time. It had become a joke: the clients would write to me, I would text Norlander, and then he would reply to the client. Maybe. Sometimes.

I was basically an unpaid office coordinator for KSQA. You’re welcome.

Blanket Suspension for KSQA Clients

One of my clients had been remotely audited since 2023, which shouldn’t be possible under AS9100. At some point, you must do on-site audits. So I had begun talking to the client about transferring so they didn’t get in trouble with the IAQG gods. While poking around that issue, we found the client was listed as “suspended” in OASIS, and yet no one had notified them. Digging further, I found that all of KSQA’s clients were suspended because KSQA itself had been suspended by its accreditation body, IAS.

As I write this, over a month later, they are still suspended.

I verified, and Norlander told me, yes, he is suspended. They failed to arrange a date for IAS’s office assessment of KSQA in December as required — a scheduling problem which is on brand for KSQA — and so they were automatically suspended.

No one at KSQA ever notified any of the clients. For over a month. Meanwhile, here is what AS9104/1 says about that:

… during suspension of an ICOP scheme AQMS accreditation the CB shall (1) Notify all existing and certification applicants of the CBs suspended status and any consequences, within 15 days of the suspension notification.

In digging further, I found that the IAS website still listed KSQA as fully accredited, and so did IAF CertSearch. When I wrote to Mohan Sabaratnam at IAS, he was very dismissive of the whole thing, insisting it was no big deal for KSQA’s 200 clients, and that the failure to list KSQA as suspended on the IAS website was a simple error.

Well, no. It’s actually a serious violation of ISO 17011, which IAS is supposed to adhere to:

8.2.2 As a minimum, the accreditation body shall make publicly available without request, information on conformity assessment bodies as described in 7.8.1 and, where applicable, information on suspension or withdrawal of accreditation, including dates and scopes.

So, what did Mohan at IAS do after he admitted his error?

Nothing, of course. As of today, KSQA is still listed as accredited by IAS, which is not only malpractice, but also fraudulent. Mohan can’t blame the website guy if he was alerted about the problem and did nothing:

Apparently, KSQA underwent its (late) office assessment by IAS last week. KSQA will presumably have its suspension lifted in a week or two, and everyone just wants to pretend nothing happened. But let’s be absolutely clear: KSQA had a duty to inform its customers that it was no longer accredited and that all their certs were flagged in OASIS as “suspended,” and IAS had a legal obligation to comply with ISO 17011 and update its registry, too. One or both had an obligation to update IAF CertSearch.

If you thought the story ended there, you’d be wrong.

This Was a Rerun

In further digging, I found that KSQA had been suspended previously in August of last year, too. And that case was much, much worse.

For that case, the IAQG Americas Certification Oversight Team (ACOT) did an office audit of IAS — not KSQA — and found “significant concerns identified with the oversight and controls of certification bodies that are accredited by IAS.” ACOT wrote 12 minor NCs and one major. Whatever the nature of those findings were — and we don’t know — it resulted in IAS being forced to suspend KSQA.

We can assume, then, that ACOT found something wrong with KSQA that IAS had either ignored or missed. So ACOT took action and shut it down.

But, once again, neither KSQA nor IAS ever notified anyone. Miraculously, the suspension was lifted just two months later, but that means for two whole months, all of KSQA’s clients were listed as “suspended” in OASIS and yet never notified.

Returning to the present day, remember I said this all started because I was asking questions about how a client in an entirely different country could have had three years in a row of fully remote AS9100 audits? I have since verified that the audit reports in OASIS were all  falsified. In OASIS, Kris Norlander indicated the audits were all “onsite.” Where OASIS requires the CB to indicate if ICT (information & communication technology) was used to perform remote audits, he clicked “NO.”  The information was then reviewed by a family member, Keith Norlander.

This repeated for all three years.

Again, no one at IAS asked how an auditor in California would have flown 16 hours — each way! — to perform an onsite audit in another country. But they rubber-stamped KSQA and are lifting their suspension.

Clients Trapped, Lawsuits Inevitable?

Did I mention it gets worse? Because it gets even worserer.

First, the KSQA website has been down for days, so nobody can contact them. That’s fun.

Next, as I now tell all my clients to fire the shit out of KSQA and start transferring, we find they can’t.

Why? In multiple cases, KSQA never uploaded the required AS9100 audit reports to OASIS. Any new CB must review the OASIS reports before beginning the transfer. Since there are no audit reports, the clients cannot get out of the KSQA trap. As their dates for required surveillance audits approach, the system will assume the clients never held their prior audits, and so they will automatically lose their AS9100 certificates. OASIS assumes the client blew off their audits, not that the CB is incompetent and didn’t update the data.

So the only way out of this trap will be for clients to lose their AS9100 — and any associated aerospace contracts! — and sign up with a new CB. Then, they have to pay extra, since they are starting as a new client, with a full Stage 1 and Stage 2 audit, all over again.

Did I mention IAS did an office assessment last week? And apparently, their underpaid, slovenly assessors never checked OASIS to find out that KSQA isn’t uploading stuff. They also didn’t look into the whole “100% remote auditing long after COVID” thing. All this, only a few months after IAQG ACOT wrote 13 nonconformities on this very problem.

Which means a class action lawsuit is probably inevitable. I’m already talking to lawyers. And, unfortunately for the parties, both IAS and KSQA are in California, making venue an easy choice.

This appears to be intentional fraud by both parties. KSQA violated AS9104 and hid their suspension — twice — hoping their clients would not find out and begin transferring. IAS likewise hid it, violating both AS9104/1 and ISO 17011, presumably to protect KSQA and ensure that Norlander keeps paying them their fees.

Clients, however, are in jeopardy. The aerospace primes, like Boeing and Lockheed, check OASIS for this exact thing. Now, client contracts with those primes are at risk because they usually require “uninterrupted” AS9100 certification. As in, no suspensions or withdrawals. And if clients lose their certifications outright because KSQA never uploaded audit results, that’s much, much worse.

Of course, the entire mess was sent to IAQG President Eric Jeffries, APAC head Graeme Drake, and IAF / GACI head Victor Gandy, and so far, they have done nothing. I’ve now roped in ACOT Chair Bret Cooper to see if he can do anything, but I may not have the correct contact information for him. (The IAQG hides its team members.)

If this does go to court, the entire scheme is going to look back wistfully on the days when I just filed complaints. With the IAF and IAQG now blocking all complaints against any CB and AB, the courts — and this website — are the last remaining tools to pound these shitheads back into conformity with rules and laws.

This stuff matters because gravity exists, and airplanes can fall out of the sky. But the certification scheme actors just don’t care.

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UPDATE 7 February 2026, 9:00 PM Eastern. Updated to add information on how some audit reports were falsified to indicate no remote auditing was performed.