On LinkedIn, French ISO 9001 expert Jean-Marie Reilhac posted the following:
Incredible! Authoritarianism has replaced consensus on the part of TC176, the committee in charge of revising ISO 9001: Out of 1700 comments to be processed in 5 days, 1650 were rejected outright by Somerville, representing the BSI… Version CD2 will be the final version, 99.9% accurate.
Reilhac is referring to the comments submitted by ISO member nations regarding the Draft International Standard (DIS) version of the upcoming ISO 9001:2026 standard. According to ISO procedures, all comments must be considered and then taken into account to drive new edits. Routinely, however, ISO empowers the Secretariat of a given TC to “disposition” comments at will. Each comment is then ranked as to whether it is accepted or not, and a rationale given.
For the prior ISO 9001:2015 standard, TC 176 Secretary Charles Corrie oversaw the dispositioning, and largely deleted most of them. For this edition, former BSI representative Sam Somerville has taken over, and — according to Reilhac — personally erased 1650 of them.
I then obtained the actual documentation released by TC 176 showing the disposition of the comments, and the data is dense. First, it’s a spreadsheet that was converted to a PDF, and I don’t have the original Excel file, so I cannot filter or sort the data. (I’m still working on that, however.)
An included cover sheet, written by Somerville, says the actual total number of comments was 1,634; I still have not been able to check if that matches the actual spreadsheet. It includes a tiny summary of the analysis, suggesting there wasn’t much of an analysis of the comments at all.
However, Reilhac is right: the vast majority were dismissed as “Not Accepted,” a ruling that ISO allows the Secretary to make at will.
Somerville was brought in by BSI to take control of the ISO 9010 rewrite and answer to them, despite her public claims to the contrary. BSI paid for an expensive YouTube video featuring Somerville talking about the revision, telegraphing that it had no intention of allowing any comments to get in the way of final publication. With the Mexico meeting concluded, where ISO and BSI have falsely claimed the comments were dispositioned, BSI then announced it had already scheduled a “publication ceremony” for the final standard in Octobner of this year. There are still two more rounds of voting to go through, but it’s clear BSI has no intention of allowing votes to get in the way.
BSI makes money on both the publication of the standard — which it then sells — and the selling of related audits.
Somerville was given her job as the head of the committee because she willingly throws entire nations and industries under the bus for her BSI masters, and to help promote her ISO consultancy, Jigsaw.
I will try to get the PDF file into some manageable format, but in the meantime, here it is for download.
Of special note is the blistering beatdown issued by Iran’s expert (likely Dr. Rouzbeh), who rips TC 176 a new asshole for their craven acts. Note how Somerville politely thanks him for his comments and then promptly ignores them.
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
