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Only pressure vessel shops and boilermakers have to be certified as far as the shop itself. Its called a U stamp, but thats ASME. ASME requires any welder that strikes an arc on a pressure boundary to be certified to perform the WPS by an AWS certified weld inspector. This is all documented and goes into a file that is kept by many parties with all kinds of inspection records. Including the names of the individual who did each weld on what some call a “weld map”.
You would be amazed what’s considered acceptable in the structural world. The welders are supposed to be certified if the job requires it be built to code, which is typically AWS D1.1 structural steel. This would depend on the states and municipalities laws. I imagine this would have required D1.1 welders. Unfortunately some shops do their own tests and send the coupons to a CWI to be bent… no way to cheat there.
A lot of shops will let you keep doing the test till you pass as well. Which is technically against the code. I always said, just because you can pass the test, doesn’t mean you can weld.
The company would probably be liable unless a 3rd party installed it in the field. It would be interesting to see the broken weld. Did the metal fail in the HAZ or did the weld itself actually fail? Was it chinese steel? Unfortunately, I doubt they have any record of heat numbers from 1999.