Couldn't say as per rules and regulations, those are...

Couldn't say as per rules and regulations, those are probably asx rules not an individual lab...

As far as those labs are concerned, they have a duty to release the resilts as fast as possible for the clients within reason. That said, if a client said "hey honestly no rush on those, please take as long as you need". They wouldn't have a problem releasing them later. But if they said "Hey hold off on releasing those results to us" they might have issue, probably not though, it is the clients money after all.

Standard practice for ALS is to release results as soon as ALL of the samples tested are verified, thats ehen they can put it into record and get paid for the work. So it wouldn't be considered immoral or unethical to hold off on releasing results if say... one sample went missing, and you needed to find it, verify it and then test it... or if, one sample was "out of expected results based on the samples assessed from the same sample set" so you need to retest and confirm the odd result .. Thats just good practice, wouldn't want to release results you didnt validate properly.

Hell it wouldn't even be untoward to just want to run another QC on the analyst that performed the tests, which would mean you hold off on releasing until you have reconfirmed competence under NATA regulation standard which might take weeks to get around to doing. (unlikely a real concern as it would hold up results and payment for dozens of other income streams)

I'm not saying they are withholding results and this is in no way meant to dig at ALS at all. It is merely one person spit balling poasible reasons which may or may not delay results... Honestly the only people that know, are the directors of a company waiting for results and the lab manager in charge of a lab in question.

Sorry to give you a non-answer answer..