Try BAFE and also trading standards who over the years have prosecuted shine & sign merchants. It's unusual (not never) to find a BAFE company missing out certain checks because of the risk of auditing - I normally ind instead they overprice, condemn unnecessarily & over provide instead with non registered non trade body members usually not doing a proper job (there are many that do as well I hasten to add).
First way of detecting shine & sign is gauge dots - lack of gauge verification is the first sign all is not well & it goes downhill from there. A common dodge is not doing an extended service, but marking it on the label & charging, because it's too much effort & time to take the extinguisher out & discharge it, strip it, inspect it & recharge, plus a number of firms don't carry recharge kit.
Cartridge types are often not internally examined, or if they are the cartridge isn't weighed - a dangerous mistake as I do find sealed cartridges that have lost content reasonably often.
Other tricks are cutting corners by not having or using new frangible 'OK' pins in Chubb, Kidde FPS & Ceo Deux headed extinguishers & by putting pull tag seals in them each year instead of changing the whole pin - put a pull seal on an OK pin & seal and the extinguisher then fails to comply with EN3 as the two elements together require too much force to break (true in practice, have done a test on this)- Chubb & Gloria have circulated notes on this, but few firms bother to take any notice.
I could fill pages with tricks of the trade like this, but won't bore you!
When I find this I put it in the FRA (as the equipment isn't competently checked and could thus fail to operate or be in a dangerous condition) & advise termination.
For those who don't hold engineers quals I have a copiously illustrated powerpoint on the key elements of the different types of service etc that I use to train our consultants - not a course to allow you to service but still a good insight, I can forward on request (largish file)
