Youth Researcher Guilty of Falsifying Panel Results

In the US, Karen Forcade, the former President of now bankrupt Youth Research, has pleaded guilty to federal court charges that she falsified child safety tests for cigarette lighters.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) ensures that lighters have features that make it more difficult for children to accidentally start fires, by commissioning tests involving panels of children who are given dummy lighters that make a sound if activated but don't light. For a lighter to pass, children must fail to activate it 85% of the time.

In 2003, Youth Research conducted tests on a lighter that had been imported by a New Jersey firm. Even though ten children managed to ignite the product, Forcade told the CPSG that the lighter had passed the test.

She and her team falsified other tests, knowing that if the results did not appear to have been conducted in line with CPSC regulations, Youth Research would not be paid by the manufacturer or importer. As a result of this particular deception, Forcade's firm received between $120k and $200k.

From 1994 to 2005, Youth Research either conducted or paid others to perform tests on lighters, and was paid $15k for each model that was tested.

According to court documents, Forcade altered birth dates, genders and schools to make it look like her firm's data complied with regulations. Additionally, in some tests, she took the data for children who tested one set of lighters, altered their birthdates by up to five years and submitted the data for a second lighter test.

The scam was uncovered when a scientist noticed abnormalities in the firm's data. He found similar handwriting on data collection forms from different testers, misspellings in the signed names of testers, and similar handwriting on all the parents' signatures on the consent forms.

'The safety of our lighters is critical,' said David Baker, General Counsel for the Lighter Association. 'So when you have somebody fraudulently producing test panels, it throws doubt into all the testing.'

Forcade is due to be sentenced at a later date.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.