Surely you are not claiming that officers of corporations sign cal certs, are you? An officer of a company generally has a job title containing words such as "president," "vice president," "general counsel," "treasurer," "comptroller" or, helpfully, "officer." Now perhaps someone with a title like that has at some time signed a certificate of calibration, but I sort of doubt it. It is also remotely possible that those who routinely sign CoC's have been named as officers of their corporations, but I doubt that, too.
Yes, actually our company is a small company, the technical manager is an officer of the company and is responsible for review of calibration as one of his tasks, you make a lot of assumptions in this post.
First of all, the signature proves nothing about the depth of the review or about the qualifications of the signer or about the quality of the signed-for work. At worst, it proves only that some clueless pointy-haired boss was hornswoggled into signing off.
Again, this is an assumption on your part, the review is outlined in a quality document and is a specific task, we deal in data and therefore we take great care in ensuring our documentation is pristine. Nor is our boss pointy haired.
Second, the meaning of a signature is open to debate unless the signed document clearly indicates what the signature means. Words like, "by signing here I affirm that I have assiduously reviewed the work in question and find it to be adequate. I hereby relieve the technician of all responsibility," would help to tie down the meaning. But how often do those kinds of words appear on QMS documents?
If you're trying to be a lawyer here you're doing a good job, in the realm of law everything is "open to debate". Again I'd refer to our review procedure for clarification to narrow down the "debate".
I'm not a lawyer and neither are you. But I think you have this bit wrong. Corporations are persons, and they generally bear the responsibility for the actions of their employees as they relate to the business of the corporation. That's why, for example, my class-action suit payout from Toshiba came from the person known as Toshiba, not from Toshiba and the chief of Toshiba engineering. This, even though Toshiba's chief engineer was certainly head of the function, and therefore responsible for the problem that caused the lawsuit.
In a class action law suit against a corporation sure. I'm talking personal liability here. For example we had a tech once who slept through his shift while pouring 25,000 gallons of JetA fuel onto the ground, he was arrested, his boss had a lien put against his house, and the corporation had to deal with the clean-up costs/emergency worker costs. By your reasoning only the corporation would be liable? So if I always have a boss I never will be held responsible?
That's YOUR practice. If it helps you sleep better at night, great. Personally I would rather rely on the knowledge, integrity and accountability of the technician doing the cal.
Isn't that what I said in my post...that this is our practice, it works for us, it's easy and, since we don't have a pointy haired boss, the review is actually a useful process which doesn't require a huge commitment of time and work. So why try to contend that? I wasn't saying you personally have to do things this way, only that we do so and find it useful and easy!
And what if there's a foul up? If there's only one signature on the cert, you only have one problem: how did it happen? If there are two signatures, you have two problems: how did it happen; and, how did the reviewer miss it.
And what if there's a foul up? If the technician misses something, or makes a calculation error and the reviewer catches it and makes the correction prior to putting the instrument back into production use? Then you have prevented numerous measurement errors...There are a lot of what ifs in this world, I'd rather have better odds of having the data correct in the first place than worry about asking why two people missed something.
There are going to be varying viewpoints on this issue, I'm simply offering mine and you can take it or leave it. We utilize complex instruments and the calibration of those instruments is of utmost importance, because the calibration is not an automated process and is vulnerable to human error we find the review process to be beneficial. And yes, our technicians are extremely competent and we are confident in their abilities, but human error is a fact of life, reviewing their work has proven useful. If you're just calibrating micrometers by all means a review with a signature isn't going to be very useful, but if you're programming variables into a complex instrument based on calibration calculations I'd rather have a review and overcheck so I can ensure that instrument is indeed working correctly.