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The sign on the shop is not the name on its safety record

Short answer: Look up a body shop's federal safety record and you are searching a name, not an owner. We ran both federal registers on 2026-09-01 with controls. They list the same companies under different names, and neither has an owner field.

By Anthony Braswell for Quorum Industries LLC, The Autobody Directory · Updated 2026-09-01 · How this was written, and what the machine may not do

How this page was produced: Researched, drafted and checked with AI assistance under human direction, and signed off by the named author. How this site is written

Start with the thing that can actually hurt somebody

[REPORTED] Federal OSHA publishes a table of the standards it cites most often, by industry. For NAICS 811121, Automotive Body, Paint, and Interior Repair and Maintenance, federal jurisdiction, October 2024 through September 2025: 53 inspections, 217 citations, 369,614 dollars in penalties. Read on 2026-09-01.

The most cited standard is 29 CFR 1910.134, Respiratory Protection: 91 citations across 33 inspections, carrying 197,146 dollars. That is 41.9 percent of the citations and 53.3 percent of the money. Second is Hazard Communication, 50 citations and 51,935 dollars.

Two-component refinish paints cure with isocyanates, which are respiratory sensitisers: once a worker is sensitised, far smaller exposures can set off a reaction. Most of the standard is about making the respirator work on that particular face.

[REPORTED] The two paragraphs that keep recurring, in OSHA's own words, read on 2026-09-01:

Those are not paperwork requirements. A respirator never fit tested to the face wearing it is a filter with a gap around it.

And this is not a small-shop problem. We read five OSHA inspection records in full on 2026-09-01, at shops trading as Gerber Collision, the US brand of publicly listed Boyd Group Services Inc. 1910.134 is cited in all five, across seven years and four states:

InspectionOpened1910.134 items cited
North Olmsted, OH (1353732.015)17 Oct 2018(e)(1), (f)(2), (k)(3), (g)(1)(i)(A), all Serious
Hudson, OH (1520555.015)19 Mar 2021(d)(1)(i), (k)(5), both Other
Hickory, NC (1606711.015)7 Jul 2022(e)(1) and (f)(2), both Repeat, 200 dollars each
Henderson, NV (1651775.015)21 Feb 2023(e)(1) and (f)(2), both Repeat
Albany, OR (1737847.015)26 Mar 2024(e)(1) Serious, plus (h)(2)(i), (k)(1)(iv) and (d)(3)(iii)(B)(2); 21 citation items in all

[CONSENT] All five cases are closed, so those citations are final as issued or settled. Paragraph (e)(1), the medical evaluation, appears in four of the five. Repeat means OSHA asserted a substantially similar prior citation against the employer. Two of the five are state plan cases and carry state rules alongside the federal ones: Albany cites Oregon Administrative Rules, Henderson a Nevada code section.

[ALLEGED, UNDER CONTEST] The same standard is the largest item in an open case at Caliber, which calls itself in its own press releases "the nation's largest auto collision repair provider". Caliber Holdings LLC, 5360 Ricky Road, Las Vegas NV, activity 1862500.015, opened 4 December 2025: four citations totalling 37,825 dollars, of which 35,465 dollars sits on 1910.134(g)(1)(i)(A), which bars a tight-fitting facepiece where there is "Facial hair that comes between the sealing surface of the facepiece and the face or that interferes with valve function", with (e)(5)(i)(A) and (f)(2) alongside. All four were contested on 15 June 2026 and the case status is OPEN. Nothing in that record is final, and it must not be described as if it were.

The bound, and it is large. 53 federal inspections in a year is not many, and the table is federal jurisdiction only: OSHA states there are "22 State Plans covering both private sector and state and local government workers", whose inspections are not in it. It shows what inspectors find when they look, not how common the hazard is. We do not claim respiratory protection is deficient at most body shops. We claim it is what federal inspectors cite most when they walk into one, at independents and consolidators alike.

Take that as the practical point. Ask whether the painters are medically evaluated and fit tested. The answer is a document, and it does not depend on who owns the shop.

Now the part that makes the rest of the record hard to read

The usual story: private equity buys a local body shop, keeps the old name on the sign, and vanishes from public enforcement data. The first half is true and the buyers say so openly. The second half is only half true.

[REPORTED] On 2026-09-01 we searched OSHA's establishment index for CollisionRight, which reported 125 shops in November 2025. It returned, verbatim: "Your search did not return any results."

The same day, EPA's hazardous waste handler register returned 54 current records. The first ten read like this:

ILD981791494 COLLISIONRIGHT LLC DBA DS PAINT & BODY Peoria Heights IL INR000104315 COLLISIONRIGHT, LLC DBA MINTON BODY SHOP Bloomington IN KYR000020768 COLLISIONRIGHT DBA PRECISION COLLISION - STOBER Louisville KY MDD022530844 COLLISIONRIGHT DBA AUTO BODY EVOLUTION - CAMDEN Parkville MD MDD981043409 COLLISIONRIGHT DBA CANBY MOTORS - BEL AIR Bel Air MD

Those are five of the fifty-four, and we read all fifty-four. Every one carries the CollisionRight name. 51 mail to Dublin, Ohio; 52 mail to 6767 Longshore Street or 6515 Longshore Loop; and of the 51 rows carrying a contact email, 50 end @collisionright.com and the fifty-first misspells that same domain.

Same company, same day, two federal registers. One has never heard of it. The other holds fifty-four records spelling out the parent and the local brand in one field.

We proved the search worked before we believed a single zero

A zero from a search box is worthless unless the box can be shown capable of returning something. Every absence here sits between a positive and a negative control, same day, same URL form.

OSHA establishment search, all states, window reported as 09/01/2016 to 09/01/2026, "Reflects inspection data through 08/29/2026":

EPA hazardous waste handler register, via the Envirofacts data service:

A second, independent pair was run on the same two instruments the same day, on different strings, because reusing a control is not running one. OSHA, establishment=Maaco: "Results 1 - 15 of 15". OSHA, establishment=Xkqvwzp+Collision: "Your search did not return any results." EPA, handler_name containing MAACO: TOTALQUERYRESULTS 2236. EPA, handler_name containing XKQVWZPQ: TOTALQUERYRESULTS 0. All eight run on 2026-09-01, before the queries they license. The 2512 counts every notification record ever filed under that string; the table below filters to each handler's current record.

The instrument returns rows when rows exist and says so plainly when they do not. The zeros below are therefore real absences of that name string, in that index, on that date. They are not evidence of a clean record. A name that does not appear in an index is a name that does not appear in an index, and that is the whole of it.

The same companies, two registers, opposite answers

All rows read on 2026-09-01.

Name searchedWhose shopsOSHA rowsEPA current handler records
CollisionRightCollisionRight054
VIVE CollisionVIVE Collision128 rows, 3 of them other companies, 25 VIVE
LaMettryQuality Collision Group013
Trew AutoQuality Collision Group11
Quality CollisionQuality Collision Group2, of which 1 is QCG by addresswithheld, see below

Both Quality Collision Group attributions are the company's own, from its news index read 2026-09-01: it announced the acquisitions of LaMettry's Collision and of Trew Auto Body by name. The third attribution is by address rather than by name. Of the two OSHA rows returned by "Quality Collision", one is "Wa317989229 - Quality Collision Pacific Northwest Llc", activity 1867027.015, at 415 South Bay Rd NE, Olympia WA. Quality Collision Group's own locations page gives 415 S Bay Rd NE, Olympia, as its Trew Auto Body shop. The OSHA record carries neither the group's name nor the name on the building. The second row, "158374 - Quality Collision Repair, Llc" in North Carolina, we do not attribute to anyone.

[REPORTED] VIVE Collision returns one OSHA row, "Vive Collision Of Lehigh Valley", Pennsylvania, 12 August 2025. The EPA substring returns 28 current records, 3 of which are other companies, leaving 25. Twenty-one of those 25 put the parent and the acquired brand in the one name field: "VIVE COLLISION DBA HAMDEN AUTO BODY", "VIVE COLLISION DBA TRAYNOR COLLISION CENTER", "VIVE COLLISION DBA OLIVER AUTOBODY-HOLYOKE" and eighteen more like them. They do not all mail to one place: 13 go to 229 East 85th Street in New York, 10 to 2360 Route 33 in Robbinsville, New Jersey, and 2 elsewhere.

[REPORTED] LaMettry is the easiest row to explain. OSHA: "Your search did not return any results." EPA: 13 current handler records. Neither says who owns it.

[REPORTED] Trew Auto Body is where both registers agree and both are useless. EPA returns one record, WAD980976971, TREW AUTO BODY INC, Bremerton WA; OSHA returns one, "Wa317967214 - Trew Auto Body Inc", 21 January 2022. We searched both responses for the string "Quality Collision". It appears in neither. A shop the group lists on its own locations page is, federally, an independent body shop in Bremerton.

One count we deliberately will not give you. The EPA operator is a substring match, and it lies. Ask for "VIVE COLLISION" and the first three records are REVVIVE COLLISION CENTER INC, REVIVE COLLISION INC and CARVIVE COLLISION CENTERS, all Californian, none of them VIVE. Ask for "QUALITY COLLISION" and the register returns 90 current records, of which eight of the first ten are unrelated businesses: QUALITY COLLISION REPAIR in Alabama, ACE QUALITY COLLISION CENTER in California and the like. Two of those ten are group entities, QUALITY COLLISION SOCAL LLC DBA AMATO'S AUTO BODY and QUALITY COLLISION NORCAL DBA BODY SHOP BY GENE COCHETTI, and reading all 90 rows, 22 have names beginning QUALITY COLLISION SOCAL or QUALITY COLLISION NORCAL. That is a count of rows under one name pattern and we do not offer it as a facility count for Quality Collision Group, because the group also files under names it bought: its Bremerton shop sits in the register as TREW AUTO BODY INC and carries no group name at all. What the 22 show is the pattern: regional owner entity, acquired brand as a d/b/a, exactly as CollisionRight and VIVE file.

And a typo does what a strategy does. [REPORTED] "CALIBER COLLISON", the company's own misspelling of itself, returns 6 current handler records, in Alabama, California, Kentucky and Texas. One carries the contact LICENSEANDPERMITS@CALIBERCOLLISON.COM, repeating the error; three carry a correctly spelled @calibercollision.com contact, so the misspelling is in the name field rather than in the company. A correctly spelled name search misses all six, because the operator matches substrings and "CALIBER COLLISION" is not inside "CALIBER COLLISON". A register keyed to free text fragments on a spelling error as readily as on a brand decision.

The sharpest number here is not a zero

[REPORTED] Boyd Group Services Inc is publicly listed. Its own website, verbatim: "The Company currently operates locations in Canada under the trade names Boyd Autobody & Glass and Assured Automotive, as well as in the U.S. under the trade name Gerber Collision & Glass." The same page gives "1300+ Collision Locations" for the company as a whole, Canada included. One US collision trade name, and no reason to be hard to find.

Search OSHA for Boyd Group: "Results 1 - 6 of 6", of which "Boyd & Mcwilliams Energy Group, Inc." of Texas is a different company we do not attribute, leaving five. Search Gerber Collision: "Results 1 - 20 of 59".

Five against fifty-nine. The owner's own name recovers under a tenth of what its brand recovers, at a public company that trades its US collision shops under one brand. Across both searches exactly one row joins the two names, and it is from September 2020: "The Boyd Group Services, Inc. Dba Gerber Collision And Glass", Michigan, 29 September 2020.

Brand retention makes this worse. It does not create it. The defect is in how the register is keyed.

Why the two registers disagree

OSHA records the sign. [REPORTED] The establishment name in OSHA's Integrated Management Information System is typed by the office that did the inspection. The IMIS disclaimer page: "The source of the information in the IMIS is the local federal or state office in the geographical area where the activity occurred." The separate search help page: "The establishment names within the database are not unique. There may be more than one variation in the way a single establishment is spelled." And back on the disclaimer page, in capitals: "THE USER SHOULD ALSO BE AWARE THAT DIFFERENT COMPANIES MAY HAVE SIMILAR NAMES AND CLOSE ATTENTION TO THE ADDRESS MAY BE NECESSARY TO AVOID MISINTERPRETATION." All read on 2026-09-01.

That warning is about one name covering several companies. Nobody warns you about the opposite and larger problem: one company under several names.

EPA records the filer. A handler record starts life as the regulated party's own notification form, so the name, address and contact are what that party wrote about itself. When a buyer centralises permits in one compliance office, that office goes into the federal record and the local brand survives as a d/b/a suffix. Hence Dublin.

Neither register has an owner field. [REPORTED] OSHA's establishment search documents five: Establishment, State, OSHA Office, Inspection Date, and open or closed case status. The words parent, owner, holding company, corporate family, EIN and DUNS do not appear on its help page. We read one EPA handler record field by field on 2026-09-01, handler CTD018672873: 88 fields, of which three carry "owner" in the field name. They are state_district_owner, fed_waste_generator_owner and state_waste_generator_owner, which are a state district code and two generator status flags. None of the three records who owns the business.

The one field that does the work is the mailing address, and only sometimes. In EPA's data a roll-up that centralised its paperwork resolves by address even when the name gives nothing; in OSHA's data it usually does not, because the address is often the shop's own street. Findability turns on a filing habit no regulator requires.

What a state licence knows, and what it shows the public

California licenses repair shops individually and is the largest state by shop count, the strongest single test available. Its regulator's own documents, read 2026-09-01:

[REPORTED] The Bureau of Automotive Repair defines an ownership change broadly, to include the purchase of an existing business, adding or deleting a partner, any transfer of ownership interest including between family members, and any change in corporate status requiring a new corporate number from the Secretary of State. And: "Registrations/licenses are not transferable to new owners." So when a consolidator buys a California shop the licence does not travel with it. The buyer applies afresh, and the state gets a fresh form.

[REPORTED] What that form asks for is the point. Form BAR-101, version 07/01/2026, collects the business organisation type, the "NAME OF BUSINESS (DBA/TO BE SHOWN ON INVOICES AND ADVERTISEMENTS)", the corporation or LLC name and number as filed with the California Secretary of State, and "CONTROLLING INDIVIDUALS OF THE BUSINESS - Provide all information, as applicable, for each controlling individual of the business, including all owners, directors, officers, partners, members, trustees, managers, and any persons who directly or indirectly control or conduct the business."

So California requires the immediate licensee entity and the natural persons who control it. The words "parent company", "holding company", "ultimate beneficial owner", "ownership percentage" and "parent" do not appear anywhere on the form. "Quality Collision SoCal LLC" satisfies it. Nothing asks which fund owns it.

One more thing about the public side, found by reading the rules before fetching. The Bureau's robots file disallows "/locator?", "/locator/", "/enforcement?" and "/enforcement/": the consumer shop locator with a query attached, and the enforcement pages. We did not fetch them, so this article makes no claim about what the locator shows.

Only California was examined. We are not claiming no US state records the chain above a licensee. That is a claim about fifty jurisdictions; we tested one.

What cuts the other way

1. Keeping the name is often what the seller asked for, and it is what the buyer paid for. [REPORTED] CollisionRight's chief executive Rich Harrison, in trade coverage dated 17 November 2025: "Why would you take that sign down?" And: "It looks and behaves and acts like many of the other MSOs that you're familiar with, with the exception that we keep the local brand." A buyer that pays for local goodwill and then erases it has destroyed what it bought. Retention is the rational choice and needs no sinister explanation.

2. These companies are not hiding from every regulator. They told one of them, in detail. CollisionRight and VIVE file with EPA under their own corporate names, acquired brand as an explicit d/b/a, at one central address, with company emails; the 22 Quality Collision Group filings we could identify by name are regional entities carrying the group's name. If concealment were the object, those filings would look like the OSHA records. We are not saying these companies hide their ownership. The opacity is an artefact of how two agencies collect names, and we do not assert intent.

3. The industry's own claim about rebranding is false, and its falsity exonerates the buyers. [REPORTED] Quality Collision Group publishes to prospective sellers, dated 24 June 2025, verbatim: "Over 90% of private equity-backed buyers eliminate original shop names within six months." Quality Collision Group is itself the portfolio company of a private investment firm: Susquehanna Growth Equity lists it, investment date 2020, headquarters McKinney, Texas. Read its own locations page on 2026-09-01 and not one location trades under the name Quality Collision Group. They carry acquired brands: Tracy Collision, Trew Auto Body, Kent Collision Center, Eveland Bros. Collision, Dorn's Body & Paint. VIVE's own list is full of ACME Auto, Ben's Auto Body, Caron's Collision Repair Center and Clarkstown International Collision. The company that published the claim is the clearest counterexample to it. The figure carries no source on the page that publishes it, whose collective source list includes a Reddit thread. It should not be repeated, and the buyers it maligns are owed the correction.

4. The fatality record does not say what it looks like it says. [CONSENT] At Gerber Collision, Hudson, Ohio, activity 1520555.015, the record gives "Event: 03/18/2021" and OSHA opened its inspection the next day. The recorded cause is not a paint exposure. OSHA's own accident summary, read in full on 2026-09-01: "Employee suffers cardiac arrest and dies. At 10:00 a.m. on March 18, 2021, Employee #1 suffered a cardiac arrest while mixing paints, and was later found laying unresponsive in doorway. Employee later died in the hospital as a result of the cardiac arrest." On the citations: no willful citation was issued, and the only Serious citation, 1910.151(b) on medical services and first aid, was deleted, taking its 9,753 dollar penalty to zero. The three surviving items were Other than Serious at exactly half their initial penalties, 7,802 dollars down to 3,901 each. We do not claim this company caused that death, and the record does not support anyone else claiming it either. Part of the wider record settled downward too, including the largest single penalty in these five cases: at Henderson the Repeat citation under 1910.134(e)(1) was deleted, taking 26,520 dollars to zero and leaving the second Repeat item at 4,018 dollars; at Hickory the three Repeat citations carry 200 dollars each.

What would have to be true for us to be wrong

The systemic claim on trial is: brand retention by consolidators obscures ownership in the public enforcement record.

If that were false, at least one of these would hold. (a) Searching a consolidator's own name returns its shops regardless of the signs. (b) Uniformly branded consolidators are fully visible under the owner's name. (c) Some register carries a parent or owner field. Part of the record does look like that, and the partial yes is the answer worth having.

So the bounded version, which is what we stand behind: federal enforcement data is keyed to a free-text name; no register we examined carries an ownership link above the immediate licensee; and whether a roll-up is findable depends on which register you ask and whether it centralised its paperwork. Not on whether the sign changed.

A control we cannot run, said plainly: the national table is not broken out by owner, so it cannot show whether consolidator shops are more or less hazardous than independents. We make no claim either way. What it does show is that the standard cited most often across the whole industry, 1910.134, is also the standard cited in all five consolidator records we read in full.

What we could not establish, and the walls we hit

REJECTED

  1. "CollisionRight has a clean OSHA record." Zero rows under a name string is not a record, and this company keeps the acquired sign up.
  2. A count of Caliber Collision's EPA facilities. Not because the services disagree. The 2,512 above is a row count and the rows are notifications, not sites: pulled in full on 2026-09-01 they resolve to 1,554 distinct handler identifiers across 927 distinct receive dates, which sits within fourteen of the 1,540 that EPA's bulk RCRA file returns on the same name test. What stops the count is that the set is defined by a name string, so it is a floor: sites filed under Caliber Auto Glass, Caliber Holdings or a legacy ABRA name are outside it. The same reasoning, and the enforcement record behind it, is on Caliber Collision: what the public record shows.
  3. A count of Quality Collision Group's EPA facilities. Reading all 90 rows removes the unrelated businesses but not the problem: the group also files under the names it bought, so any count keyed to its own name undercounts by an amount we cannot measure.
  4. An OSHA inspection rate per establishment. It needs a denominator we did not re-verify.
  5. What California's consumer shop locator displays. The parameterised locator is robots-disallowed and we did not fetch it.
  6. Total violation counts per company. OSHA publishes no total, its own pages can disagree between search column and detail page, and a sum we compute is our arithmetic, not a finding.
  7. Any statement that these companies conceal their ownership. Two of them tell EPA exactly who they are, in the name field, at a corporate address, with a corporate email.

Corrections

Related

Sources

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