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Comment by radiowave | Hacker News Reader

As someone who works in the manufacturing of steel components for marine use, the most surprising thing for me is that there's no mention of any quality-system auditor being involved. Did the auditor miss this? Is there no auditor? If so, why was their customer (the prime contractor) willing to tolerate this? Why were the company's insurers willing to tolerate it?

No doubt the metallurgist was grossly irresponsible here, but I do wonder whether they might be making a song and dance about this one aspect to distract from a whole chain of careless practice.

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Depending on how records were kept, it could have been incredibly easy to falsify the records even with an auditor checking them over. The fraud went back to the 80s so I'm sure many of those records were paper-only and continued to be paper-only for many years later. There's only so much time for an auditor to pull every string. If they don't suspect fraud in the first place, they probably aren't going to find it if it's not obvious. The fraud may have been as simple as her saying she performed a test, making up results, and writing down a list of equipment used along with calibration dates. An inspector looks at the results, sees everything is in spec, looks at the equipment list and sees it's all in calibration, everything checks out but she never performed the test to begin with. Maybe she got caught because someone found that the equipment was in use for other tests at the time she said she performed them or that the equipment was used for a much shorter time than when others ran the same test. When I test something and use calibrated equipment or tools, no one is actually checking to make sure I actually used those specific items. Quality systems kind of fall apart when people straight up lie. They work well to catch mistakes or nonconformances but a straight up lie is hard to detect unless you enforce witness signatures.

The QA is extensive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUBSAFE

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