19.03.2008

Trainer sues NCCCO

The California Crane School, an operator training centre based in Nevada City, California is to file a suit against the National Commission for the Certification of Crane Operators, this afternoon for removing it from its list of approved examiners.

The school was struck off in January and permanently suspended from all NCCCO certification and accreditation.

The NCCCO is a not for profit organisation which works with privately owned training centres and trainers to test and certify crane operators. For those of you familiar with IPAF, the NCCCO is owned and organised in a similar way, although it cocentrates on examining and certifyoing operators, not training them.

The suit filed by the school and its director John Nypl, alleges that the NCCCO has tried for years to close it down and that it has withdrawn it from the list of approved centres in order to favour one of its competitors.

Graham Brent, the commission's executive director, said that the allegations "are groundless. Naturally, we'll be responding as the process requires, our relationship has been a tense one."

In 2006, a federal court ruled that an examiner who worked for Nypl misappropriated secure examinations from the commission.

Nypl claims that the NCCCO is violating the Cartwright Act, California’s antitrust law and is seeking three times actual damages, plus costs and fees puported to be £30 million.

Vertikal Comment

This is a most bizarre case and another one that, at least on the surface, should be thrown out at the first opportunity. Nypl was found guilty of stealing exam papers from the NCCCO and was clearly no longer reliable as an independent examination station.

His main business of training operators is not affected by his suspension, as the NCCCO exam can be sat by anyone, as long as they pass the tough written and practical tests, it matters not a jot where or how they are trained. Nypl is thus continuing to train operators for the NCCCO certificate but must now send his trainees to an independent examiner - or call one in to his facility.

The NCCCO certification scheme is first class and is what the CITB/CPCS programme in the UK could be if the focus was less on the generation of cash and more on getting a greater number of operators trained to a higher standard.