1. Can management accountants do anything to help engineers and designers focus more on considering the cost of failures in quality and quality control?
2. Can you list some of the internal and external failure costs for the two issues described above?

In recent years, two global companies have had to deal with some quite large costs as a result of quality control failures. First, take the example of Toyota cars in the USA. In late 2009 and early 2010, Toyota recalled several of its US models, the Camry in particular, after several accidents occurred due to a faulty accelerator pedal. The recall involved over 5 million vehicles, and sales and production were suspended for a time in the USA. According to author Paul Ingrassia, the problem occurred because Toyota broke one of its key principles called the ‘three nevers’ at its US manufacturing plants: never build a new product, in a new facility, with a new workforce. In the case of the Camry in the USA, all three were broken. This cost the company $2 billion before any legal costs.
Toyota was fined $1.2 billion in March 2014 by the US Justice Department. The recall woes continued, with a recall of over 6 million vehicles in April 2014, costing the company at least $600 million in repair costs.
In April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which was ultimately under the control of British Petroleum (BP), exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. An oil slick resulted, which lasted for approximately 3 months and caused extensive damage to the environment and coastlines around the Gulf of Mexico.
By September 2010, the total costs had risen to almost $10 billion, with BP setting aside a provision of $20 billion. In January 2011, a US presidential commission squarely laid the blame for the disaster at the door of BP and its contractors. The report cited several systemic failures, short-cuts and sub-standard materials and workmanship as the cause, all of which it attributed to management failures. By 2016, BP published its final estimate of the total cost at just under $62 billion.