I have worked in, for, with and been scrutinized by Quality Assurance. *"Quality Assurance"*, can be bought, paid, hijacked, and play favoritism, at almost anytime. So without a strong leader willing to look at the work of the QA department, that business will fail, or have major problems. The news is full of failures at the Quality Assurance level. 
So I think you will need to have a very very important person who would and could be fired for any failure of the Quality Assurance branch. So a function of the Chief Financial Officer would be the buck stops here person of Quality Assurance.