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THE QUALITY
CONTROL SELF-VALIDATION SCAM
Self-Validation for Quality Control has been around for many years now,
but no self-respecting quality professional will have anything to do
with it because it's so open to abuse.
In a nutshell Self-Validation is when a Contract Company or a Worker
signs-off their own work, saying that it has been finished to an
acceptable standard.
What makes this scam so popular is that both sides of a contract see
themselves as winners. This is because they both 'make money' or 'save
money', the only persons that suffer are those people who have to live
with the resulting shoddy work.
A Quality Assurance Expert explains how the scam would work in a
Borough Council setting, for convenience described in this ficticous
scenario set in Barrow and Hindpool;
1)
Imagine that first of all the Council engages a Contractor Company to
do some parcels of work for them, say replacing 100 Widgets, one per
street. This means 100 distinct parcels of work. The Council insists
that the Contactor Company does Self-Validation for each parcel of
work, because that saves the Council the effort and money otherwise
involved if the council itself had to inspect the finished jobs, or had to engage a proper Inspection Company.
2)
The Contactor Company agrees to do Self-Validation, but naturally they
will have to charge a little extra for the extra work caused by doing
it.
3)
Of course the Contractor Company doesn't really inspect the finished
work at all. They simply get their employee who does the work to tick a
box on a Form, saying the work has been inspected by the Responsible
Person and has been found to be completed to an acceptable Standard. In
reality the vast majority of the Widgets have been installed in a very
shoddy could-not-care-less manner that would not have passed a genuine
inspection.
4)
At the end of the Contract all 100 Forms are given to the the Council
to show that the work was done properly. The Council is happy with this
because they now have 'Documentary Proof' that all the work was carried
out satifactorily. If events in the future ever bring to light that the
work was defective, the Council will say that it was not their fault,
because the company they employed to inspect the work decieved them.
5)
If the matter of the supposed deception by the Contractor Company is
ever put in the hands of Lawyers, it will be found that the Contractor
Company says
a) The man who
did the deception has now left the company.
b) Nothing. Because the company has ceased trading.
Fictional Council Lacky says:
This could not happen because with Self-Validation Contracts we always
inspect 10% of the work parcels. If we find anything sub-standard we
would inspect 100% and we would never give the company another
contract.
Reply to Fictional Council Lacky:
Yes! And we all know that the 10% you would inspect would all be in the
leafy suberbs, where the work was all done to the proper quality
standard. None of the 90 Widgets installed in Hindpool would get
inspected. The Contractor Company would have known that this would be
the case right from the start. Thats the key to how the scam works, all
the shoddy work would be in Hindpool where the company knew they could
get away with it.
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