My theory is that there has been someone not very knowledgeable working with mid-end October 2016 applications, who has placed them in the QC-Inventory file by accident (at least that is where mine is, and apparently many others too). Almost everyone else has had their file in QC-Pending according to GCMS notes, and people here were pretty surprised that my file was still in Inventory at the end of September... And by the way, still in October.
Edit. I have ordered my third set of GCMS and I'm pretty sure I can still confirm the same thing, that my file is not pending but is in the inventory (it'll be 13 months since my application in about a week).