Sam,
Speaking from a Petrochemical standpoint I think the problem of quality checks and incompetency in dealing with pipe stress calculations started a long long time ago, and it started in the west and is speading to the east.
I put the blame solely at the foot of corporate management. All too often if not always, Stress Engineers are responsible to Lead Piping Engineers who in most instances are not qualified Engineers and have very limited appreciation stress issues, and often have different agendas. As far as some of them are concerned, stress is an impedance to meeting those schedule dates. I know of many instances where manhours allocated for stresswork was wholly inadequete to do the job and often no manhours were allocated for checking calcs. For many years this has been the norm in the petochem industry and still is. Nothing has changed except in some European countries such as Holland where a more rigorous QA is applied.
I feel the impotus has to come from ASME, for instance ASME B31.3 should make it mandatory for all comprehensive stress calculations to be checked and approved by a Professional Engineer, this would go a long way to ensuring good QA.

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