MCERT Scammer Scandal Much Bigger Than Originally Reported

Last week, I wrote about some dubious ads running in the UK from a certificate mill known as MCERT. I reported it was run by someone named “Anthony Wood” out of the UK, and despite claiming to have clients like Deloitte and Toyota, it hadn’t reported any revenue in years and was filed as “dormant.”

Now, a whistleblower has come forth and filled in some more details. MCERT is apparently a huge presence in Romania and has been pumping out fake ISO certificates for many years. The whistleblower wrote:

[MCERT’s] operation is far larger than it appears in the UK, and is run out of Romania.

I live in Romania and I can tell you that MCert exists here for many years and they have thousands of clients among Romanian businesses. They are exactly what you call a “certificate mill”. They provide certificates without any audit, you can get certified in a few hours if you pay a few hundred euros. They don’t employ or contract any auditors, there’s no LinkedIn profile of a Romanian auditor that is connected to this business – Management Certification.  Still, they do indeed have thousands of “certified” companies in Romania.

They operate several websites including www.mcert.ro, iso-romania.com, and iso9001.ro.

From all appearances, it seems there is no such person as “Anthony Wood” at all. Instead, the operation is run by a husband-and-wife team, Cosmin and Oana Voevodschi. Their Facebook and Instagram pages (here and here) show them on lavish vacations, including a cruise on the massive Icon of the Seas, and driving expensive luxury cars, so the fraud industry is apparently profitable.

Making matters worse, however, is that the scams were reported to Romania’s IAF-member accreditation body, RENAR, which has refused to take action. That’s part of the IAF’s script, to tell complainants they can only control the behaviors of IAF member bodies, and not certificate mills. Meanwhile, the IAF insists that its job is to ensure the trust and validity of certifications. Those two things don’t quite line up.

EU law, meanwhile, demands that certification bodies in that region get accredited:

Art 7.1 of Regulation 765/ 2008 “A conformity assessment body shall request accreditation by the national accreditation body of the Member State in which it is established”.

The law is supposed to be enforced throughout the EU by the IAF regional body, European Cooperation for Accreditation, “EA.” Hold that thought.

If you recall, we had filed numerous complaints against various high-profile European certification and accreditation bodies, with the Quality Austria case probably being the most dramatic. In that case, Quality Austria (QA) was operating a consulting company in Qatar and openly marketing it as part of QA. The QA representative, Linda Ross, would provide the consulting and then issue a certificate from QA, accredited by the official accreditation body, Akkreditierung Austria. That complaint provided details on how Ross and QA paid for a “female companion” and five-star dinners for AA auditor Adolph Kerbl when he audited the Qatar office. He then gave the QA operation there a clean bill of health and covered up the scandals.

When we filed a complaint, both QA and AA ignored the matter, and Kerbl was never sanctioned. We then filed a complaint with EA, as the IAF regional body for Europe. EA also covered up the matter and sided with QA and AA, ignoring the evidence. That issue was ruled on by Daniela Ionescu — who worked for RENAR and comes from Romania.

See where this is going?

(We later filed a lawsuit in the Austrian courts over the matter, but Kerbl also works for the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber, and the Austrian government had the case tabled in court. It’s still filed, but the judge never put the matter on the docket, effectively killing it.)

So, we cannot expect RENAR or EA — which are essentially run by the same people — to enforce EU law. They have a long history of not doing so. (Ionescu has since taken on peer review management activities at IAF and its new spinoff, GLOBAC.)

The whistleblower said the problem is rampant in Romania:

In tenders, the Romanian legislation asks for accredited certificates and since they are “accredited” by fake ABs, such as IMAB or UAS, they have their certificates accepted. And this is speculated by most companies. Why go through an audit, pay more and spend time and energy implementing a system, when you can get several certificates today for the tender tomorrow? And it’s also cheap…

Meaning, scammers like the Voevodschis can commit international business fraud all day long and collect their money to spend on vacations and Lamborghinis without any consequences.

They can also create fake companies in the UK, too, since nobody in that country cares, either.