The UL certification misconduct and four concealments (2021)

Quality assurance as a question still open

What this case put to the company is that however finely the rules and audits are drawn, unless the people operating them face the facts rather than look away, misconduct is preserved rather than corrected. The 2010 business acquisition, the 2013 meeting, the 2015 remediation documents — Toyobo had at least three occasions to confront the facts, and on each one the confrontation was replaced by a technical detour into developing a substitute material, while the simplest option, reporting, went on being passed over. That the division concerned was a closed organisation with little personnel exchange can be seen as one of the conditions that made the deferral possible.

Creating a quality assurance division and refreshing the management line-up were attempts to reach into that soil from outside. Yet the 2022 review of similar cases, which found “no serious incidents” while acknowledging non-compliance with internal rules and problems of compliance awareness, suggests that an organisational disposition capable of sustaining a decade-long concealment is not wholly replaced by a single change of structure. Accumulating in the shadow of the forward-looking story of a textile maker becoming a functional-materials company, this case leaves Toyobo with a question that is still open: how far the quality assurance division established under President Takeuchi Ikuo can go on maintaining its independence.