Admit Incompleteness Without Prior Disclosure
Approve Incomplete Design Documents (Action 4) → Project Advertised for Bids (Event 6)
NSPE Board of Ethical Review Cases on Incomplete/Deficient Engineering Deliverables
did not inform anyone as to their incompleteness
Engineer A generally agrees with Hi-Lo's characterization
Ethical analysis of Engineer A's conduct
BER precedents addressing engineer obligations when delivering incomplete or deficient drawings and specifications, and the duty to disclose known deficiencies to clients and reviewing authorities
BER 82-5 Defense Engineer Whistleblower Personal Conscience Right Non-Mandatory
Precedent case BER 82-5: engineer documented and reported excessive costs and time delays by subcontractors to employer; employer rejected reports; Board found no mandatory duty to continue but recognized ethical right to do so.
Engineer employed by large defense industry firm (BER Case No. 82-5)
Whistleblower Non-Public-Safety Personal Conscience Right Acknowledgment Obligation
The engineer in BER Case No. 82-5 did not bear a mandatory ethical obligation to continue internal advocacy after employer rejection or to report concerns about excessive costs and time delays to external authorities, but retained an ethical right to do so as a matter of personal conscience, with awareness that exercising that right might result in loss of employment.
the Board ruled that the engineer did not have an ethical obligation to continue his efforts to secure a change in the policy after his employer rejected his reports or to report his concerns to proper authority, but has an ethical right to do so as a matter of personal conscience.
After employer rejection of engineer's internal reports
The Board also stated that if an engineer feels strongly that an employer's course of conduct is improper when related to public concerns, and if the engineer feels compelled to blow the whistle to expose facts as he sees them, he may well have to pay the price of loss of employment.
the Board was unwilling to make a blanket statement that there is an ethical duty in these kinds of situations for the engineer to continue the campaign within the company and make the issue one for public discussion.
BER 82-5 Precedent Non-Safety Public Fund Waste Reporting Discretion
From employer rejection of internal reports through engineer's decision on further action
the Board ruled that the engineer did not have an ethical obligation to continue his efforts to secure a change in the policy after his employer rejected his reports
Non-Safety Public Fund Waste Reporting Discretion State
Engineer in BER Case No. 82-5 who documented excessive costs and time delays by subcontractors
Board ruling that engineer had ethical right but not duty to pursue further
the issue does not allege a danger to public health or safety, but is premised upon a claim of unsatisfactory plans and the unjustified expenditure of public funds
Employer rejection of engineer's reports on excessive costs and time delays
BER Board BER 82-5 Precedent Factual Distinction Dam Design Case
BER Precedent Factual Distinction Public-Funds vs Safety Context Discrimination Capability
The Board demonstrated the capability to retrieve BER 82-5, identify its transferable principle that the NSPE Code applies beyond narrow public-safety grounds, and distinguish the present case from BER 82-5 on the basis that the present case involves affirmative design completion obligations and deceptive acts rather than a discretionary whistleblower reporting decision.
Board's ethical analysis of dam design case, using BER 82-5 as a precedent for public-funds ethics scope while distinguishing it on affirmative design obligation grounds.
The Board's discussion explicitly comparing and distinguishing BER 82-5 from the present case, applying the transferable principle while identifying the critical factual distinction regarding affirmative design obligations.
In BER Case No. 82-5, where an engineer employed by a large defense industry firm documented and reported to his employer excessive costs and time delays by sub-contractors, the Board ruled that the engineer did not have an ethical obligation to continue his efforts...
As in Case No. 82-5, the issue does not allege a danger to public health or safety, but is premised upon a claim of unsatisfactory plans and the unjustified expenditure of public funds.
Unlike Case No. 82-5, this case does not involve a conflict with the ethical requirement of confidentiality, but concerns the affirmative responsibility of engineers to complete plans in conformity with applicable engineering standards and avoid deceptive acts.
BER Case 82-5 Defense Engineer Whistleblower Right vs Duty Discrimination
Whistleblowing Right vs Mandatory Duty Discrimination Capability
The engineer in BER 82-5 exercised the capability to recognize that after employer rejection of his reports, he had an ethical right — but not a mandatory duty — to continue escalating concerns about excessive costs and time delays as a matter of personal conscience, even at the risk of employment loss.
Defense industry engineer who documented and reported excessive subcontractor costs and time delays; employer rejected reports; engineer faced decision whether to escalate further.
The Board's ruling in BER 82-5 that the engineer had an ethical right but not an obligation to continue his campaign or report to proper authority after employer rejection.
BER Case 82-5 Defense Industry Whistleblower Engineer
In BER Case No. 82-5, where an engineer employed by a large defense industry firm documented and reported to his employer excessive costs and time delays by sub-contractors, the Board ruled that the engineer did not have an ethical obligation to continue his efforts to secure a change in the policy after his employer rejected his reports or to report his concerns to proper authority, but has an ethical right to do so as a matter of personal conscience.
{'license': 'Professional Engineer', 'employer': 'Large defense industry firm', 'precedent_case': 'BER Case No. 82-5'}
Referenced precedent: an engineer employed by a large defense industry firm who documented and reported excessive costs and time delays by subcontractors to their employer, whose ethical right (but not duty) to escalate beyond employer rejection was affirmed by the Board as a matter of personal conscience.
{'type': 'employer', 'target': 'Defense industry firm (unnamed)'}
an engineer employed by a large defense industry firm documented and reported to his employer excessive costs and time delays by sub-contractors
the engineer did have an ethical right to pursue the matter further, even to the point of public disclosure
NSPE Board of Ethical Review Case No. 82-5
In Case No. 82-5, the Board found that, while the Code did not require disclosure, the engineer did have an ethical right to pursue the matter further, even to the point of public disclosure.
NSPE Board of Ethical Review in analyzing Engineer A, B, and C obligations
Cited as controlling precedent for the ethical right (vs. duty) of engineers to pursue public disclosure of employer misconduct involving unjustified expenditure of public funds, and for the personal conscience framework governing whistleblowing where public health and safety are not directly at stake.
BER Case No. 82-5 before current Board discussion of Engineer A, B, and C case
Benevolent Motive Non-Cure Applied to Engineer A Funding Assumption
Rationalization of incomplete document delivery through federal funding assumption
Engineer A's confidence that federal funds would cover cost overruns — even if genuinely motivated by a desire to protect the local agency from financial burden — does not cure the ethical violation of delivering incomplete documents without disclosure
Even if Engineer A's assumption about federal funding was well-intentioned (protecting local taxpayers from cost), the ethical evaluation turns on the act of delivering incomplete documents without disclosure, not on the subjective goodness of the financial assumption
Engineer A Incomplete Deliverable Concealing Design Engineer
Benevolent Motive Does Not Cure Ethical Violation
Engineer A was confident that sufficient federal funds (and not local funding) would cover any potential increased costs.
Good intentions about funding coverage do not transform an incomplete, undisclosed deliverable into an ethically permissible one; the violation is determined by the act, not the motive
CausalLink_Admit Incompleteness Without P
CausalLink_Approve Incomplete Design Docu
CausalLink_Raise Unbuildable Design at Pr
CausalLink_Rationalize Incompleteness via
CausalLink_Submit Incomplete Design Docum
CausalLink_Submit Low Bid on Inadequate D
Competence Boundary Recognition and Escalation Obligation Invoked Against Engineer B
Engineer B's approval of Engineer A's incomplete dam design drawings and specifications
Engineer B, lacking the technical competence to adequately review Engineer A's incomplete dam design, was ethically obligated to recognize that limitation and report it to a supervisor so that a competent engineer could be assigned — the failure to do so, not the mere lack of competence itself, constituted the ethical violation
The Board drew a precise distinction: lacking competence is not itself a violation, but failing to recognize that lack and take corrective action (escalating to a supervisor) is a violation — establishing a self-awareness and escalation duty
Engineer B Competence-Unrecognizing Plan Approval Engineer
Competence Boundary Recognition and Escalation Obligation
Not possessing adequate competency to perform a task is not in and of itself a violation of the NSPE Code, but the failure to recognize the lack of competency and take appropriate action to address the situation is a violation of the NSPE Code.
The principle resolves the tension by separating the competence question from the recognition-and-escalation question; the latter is the operative ethical obligation
Engineers have an obligation to perform services within their area of competence.
If Engineer B was not able to perform the necessary reviews of Engineer A's work, Engineer B should have provided this information to a supervisor who would have assigned an appropriate engineer to perform the review.
Complete Design Delivery Obligation Invoked Against Engineer A
Dam design drawings and specifications delivered incomplete under full-service design contract
Schedule Pressure Non-Excuse for Incomplete Deliverable Disclosure
Engineer A, retained under a full-service design contract for a dam project, was obligated to deliver complete design drawings and specifications — not partial documents — because the contract did not include design delegation clauses or design-build provisions that would permit partial pre-contractor design
The Board distinguished full-service design contracts from design-build and delegated-design arrangements, establishing that Engineer A's contract required complete design delivery with no permissible partial-completion exception
Complete Design Delivery Obligation in Full-Service Engineering Contracts
It is clear that Engineer A had an obligation to provide a complete set of design drawings and specifications on the project in which Engineer A was engaged.
The contractual obligation to deliver complete design is not modified by schedule pressure or funding expectations; Engineer A was fully required to provide the complete design
Unlike what is required on some projects (e.g., design/build or construction contracts with specific design delegation clauses or provisions) where the engineer is expected to only design a certain percentage of the project prior to the selection of the contractor, here, Engineer A was fully required to provide the complete design on the project.
It was not ethical for Engineer A to submit drawings and specifications for review and approval that he knew were incomplete.
Beyond the Board's finding that Engineer A acted unethically in submitting incomplete drawings, his conduct was further aggravated by the specific vulnerability of his client. The local public agency lacked any in-house technical capacity to detect the deficiencies Engineer A knew existed. This asymmetry of knowledge and capability imposed a heightened affirmative disclosure obligation on Engineer A — one that went beyond the baseline duty owed to a technically sophisticated client. By exploiting, even if passively, the agency's inability to self-protect, Engineer A's omission crossed from mere negligence into a form of professional exploitation of client dependency. The NSPE Code's requirement that engineers act as faithful agents and advisors is most demanding precisely when the client cannot independently verify the adequacy of the professional's work product. Engineer A's silence in this context was not a neutral omission but an active breach of the trust relationship that defines the engineer-client engagement.
The Board's conclusion that Engineer A acted unethically does not fully reckon with the compounding ethical injury his submission inflicted on the competitive bidding process itself. When Engineer A submitted signed and sealed drawings he knew to be incomplete, he did not merely harm his direct client or the federal funding agency — he corrupted the integrity of the public procurement process for every contractor who prepared and submitted a bid. Contractors other than Hi-Lo Construction invested resources pricing a project whose true scope was unknowable from the deficient documents. They could not have submitted accurate or competitive bids, and the award to the lowest bidder was therefore not a genuine market outcome but an artifact of an artificially constrained information environment. This harm to third-party bidders and to the fairness of public procurement is an independent ethical injury that the Board's analysis, focused on the tripartite relationship among Engineer A, Engineer B, and Engineer C, did not explicitly address. The NSPE Code's prohibition on deceptive acts and its requirement of objective and truthful professional representations extend to all foreseeable parties who rely on engineering documents, not merely the immediate client.
Engineer A's rationalization that federal funds — rather than local funds — would absorb any cost overruns from the incomplete design does not merely fail as a mitigating defense; it constitutes an independent ethical violation distinct from the incompleteness itself. By invoking the federal funding source as a justification for non-disclosure, Engineer A implicitly misrepresented to the federal agency the adequacy of the documents it was being asked to approve and fund. The federal agency's approval decision was predicated on the assumption that signed and sealed drawings represented a professionally complete and conforming design. Engineer A's knowing submission of deficient documents under seal, combined with his internal calculation that federal funds would cover the consequences, amounts to a misrepresentation in his professional dealings with a public funding body. The NSPE Code's prohibition on deceptive acts and its bar on completing or sealing plans not in conformity with applicable standards are not satisfied by the engineer's private belief that downstream funding mechanisms will neutralize the harm. The source of funding is ethically irrelevant to the completeness obligation, and the Board's implicit rejection of this rationalization should be understood as establishing that public funds are not a risk-absorption mechanism that licenses professional shortcuts.
The Board's conclusion that Engineer B acted unethically in approving incomplete drawings raises a nuance the Board did not fully develop: Engineer B's approval did not merely fail to catch Engineer A's deficiencies — it actively laundered them. A federal agency approval stamp on a set of drawings carries independent epistemic authority in the procurement chain. Contractors, the local public agency, and the public reasonably interpret federal approval as a second-level professional verification of document adequacy. By approving the drawings without substantive review or competence-appropriate scrutiny, Engineer B transformed what was Engineer A's unilateral misrepresentation into an apparently bi-validated professional certification. This amplification of the original ethical violation is a distinct harm attributable to Engineer B. The NSPE Code's responsible charge and professional competence standards require that an engineer's approval reflect genuine engagement with the documents being approved. Where an approving engineer either lacks domain-specific competence to evaluate the submission or fails to exercise that competence, the ethical obligation is to escalate, return the documents with a deficiency notice, or decline approval — not to ratify by default.
The Board's finding against Engineer B also implicates a systemic institutional ethics question that the Board's individual-focused analysis did not address. Engineer B's failure may reflect not only personal ethical shortcoming but also a structural deficiency in the federal agency's review process — one in which approval authority was delegated to an engineer without adequate domain competence or without procedural safeguards requiring substantive technical verification before approval. While the NSPE Code speaks to individual engineers' obligations, the Board's conclusion against Engineer B implicitly signals that engineers in institutional approval roles bear a professional duty to advocate internally for review processes that match the technical complexity of submitted projects. An engineer who knows or should know that the agency's review process is inadequate to catch deficiencies of the kind present here has an obligation to flag that systemic gap, not merely to perform a perfunctory review within a broken system. This extends the Board's conclusion from individual culpability to a broader professional responsibility for the integrity of institutional gatekeeping functions.
The Board's conclusion that Engineer C acted unethically in submitting a bid on a project he later characterized as unbuildable requires a more granular temporal analysis than the Board provided. The ethical violation is not simply that Engineer C identified deficiencies after winning the contract — it is that the sequence of his conduct suggests the deficiencies were either discoverable or actually discovered during pre-bid review, yet he submitted a bid anyway and raised the unbuildability claim only at the pre-construction conference, after the contract was secured. This timing pattern raises the inference that Engineer C may have strategically withheld his constructability concerns to win the contract at a low bid price, intending to renegotiate scope and price after award — a practice that is both commercially opportunistic and ethically impermissible for a licensed engineer. In his dual role as engineer and contractor, Engineer C possessed professional competence that other bidders may have lacked to identify the design deficiencies. That superior competence, rather than relieving him of disclosure obligations, intensified them: he was better positioned than any other market participant to flag the deficiencies before bid submission, and his failure to do so harmed both the public agency and competing contractors who priced the project without the benefit of his professional insight.
The Board's three conclusions, taken together, reveal a cascading ethical failure in which each actor's violation enabled and amplified the next actor's violation — a dynamic the Board did not explicitly theorize but which has important implications for how professional ethics obligations should be understood in multi-party public procurement contexts. Engineer A's submission of incomplete documents created the predicate condition for Engineer B's approval failure; Engineer B's approval created the procurement legitimacy that induced Engineer C and other contractors to invest in bid preparation; and Engineer C's decision to bid rather than disclose completed the cycle by allowing a fatally deficient project to reach contract award. No single actor's ethical compliance would have been sufficient to prevent the harm — Engineer B's proper rejection of the drawings would have stopped the cascade, as would Engineer C's pre-bid disclosure — but each actor's violation was a necessary condition for the harm that ultimately materialized. This interdependence suggests that the NSPE Code's individual-focused obligations should be understood as collectively constituting a system of redundant ethical checkpoints, each of which is designed to catch failures that earlier checkpoints missed. The ethical weight on each downstream actor therefore increases as earlier checkpoints fail, because the downstream actor is the last available safeguard against public harm.
It was not ethical for Engineer B to approve a set of incomplete drawings on behalf of the Federal government for competitive bidding.
Engineer A's submission of signed and sealed incomplete drawings to the federal funding agency constituted a form of misrepresentation that is aggravated, not mitigated, by his assumption that federal funds would absorb cost overruns. The act of sealing documents carries an implicit professional certification of completeness and conformity. By invoking the availability of federal funds as a private rationalization for non-disclosure, Engineer A effectively treated public money as a personal insurance policy against the consequences of his own professional shortfall. This reasoning compounds the ethical violation: it demonstrates not only that Engineer A knew the documents were deficient, but that he made a deliberate, calculated decision to conceal that deficiency from the very agency whose funds he expected to bear the resulting costs. The federal funding agency was thus doubly deceived — first by the implicit certification of completeness in the sealed drawings, and second by Engineer A's silent assumption that the agency's resources would remedy his incomplete work without its knowledge or consent.
The local public agency's acknowledged lack of in-house technical capacity to evaluate drawings and specifications imposed a heightened affirmative disclosure obligation on Engineer A that went beyond what would ordinarily be required when dealing with a technically sophisticated client. When a professional engineer knows that his client cannot independently verify the adequacy of the work product, the engineer's duty of honest representation is not merely passive — it is not satisfied by simply refraining from active lies. It becomes an active duty to affirmatively communicate known deficiencies, because the client has no independent means of discovering them. Engineer A's silence in this context was not a neutral omission; it was a functional deception, because the local public agency was wholly dependent on Engineer A's professional judgment and had no realistic ability to detect the incompleteness on its own. The heightened disclosure obligation was therefore not merely a matter of professional courtesy but a structural ethical requirement arising from the asymmetry of technical knowledge between the engineer and his client.
A formal written notification to the local public agency disclosing the known incompleteness of the drawings before submission would have been a necessary but not automatically sufficient condition for satisfying Engineer A's ethical obligations. Such written disclosure would have eliminated the deception element of the violation and would have transferred informed decision-making authority back to the client, which is itself an important ethical requirement. However, written notification alone would not have discharged Engineer A's obligation under the code provision prohibiting him from signing or sealing plans not in conformity with applicable engineering standards. The act of sealing incomplete documents carries an independent integrity obligation that cannot be waived by client consent alone. Even if the local public agency, fully informed, had directed Engineer A to proceed with submission, Engineer A would have retained an independent professional duty to decline to seal documents he knew to be incomplete, or at minimum to qualify his seal with an explicit notation of the known deficiencies. Client authorization is not a license to misrepresent the state of professional work to third parties, including the federal funding agency.
The competitive bidding process itself sustained an independent ethical injury that the Board's conclusions, focused on individual actors, do not fully articulate. When incomplete drawings and specifications are advertised for competitive bids, every contractor other than the one who ultimately discovers and discloses the deficiencies is harmed by being asked to price a project whose true scope is unknowable from the documents provided. Contractors who submitted bids in good faith based on the deficient documents either priced the work incorrectly — potentially winning a contract they cannot perform profitably — or lost the contract to a low bidder whose price may have been artificially low precisely because the scope was undefined. The integrity of public competitive procurement depends on all bidders working from the same complete informational baseline. Engineer A's submission of incomplete documents, and Engineer B's approval of them for bidding, jointly corrupted that baseline and rendered the entire procurement process unreliable as a mechanism for achieving fair pricing of public work. This harm to the procurement process is distinct from, and cumulative with, the harms to the individual parties.
The tension between Engineer A's faithful agent obligation to deliver on the contracted schedule and his paramount obligation to protect public welfare is real but ultimately not a genuine conflict that could excuse his conduct. The NSPE Code resolves this tension explicitly by establishing that public welfare is paramount — meaning it is not one consideration to be weighed against schedule compliance but a threshold constraint that overrides contractual performance obligations when the two conflict. Engineer A's schedule pressure was a real professional difficulty, but it did not create an ethical permission to submit incomplete documents; it created an ethical obligation to disclose the conflict to his client and, if necessary, to refuse to seal documents he could not certify as complete. The faithful agent obligation requires an engineer to serve his client's genuine interests, which include receiving honest professional advice about project status — not merely receiving deliverables on time regardless of their adequacy. An engineer who delivers incomplete work on schedule to avoid a difficult conversation with his client has not served the client faithfully; he has served his own convenience at the client's expense.
Engineer B's approval of the incomplete drawings created a compounded ethical harm beyond his own individual violation: it generated a false impression of independent professional verification that the documents did not merit. When a second licensed engineer reviews and approves a set of drawings submitted by a first engineer, the approval carries an implicit representation to downstream parties — including the contracting agency, prospective bidders, and the public — that a competent professional has independently assessed the documents and found them adequate. Engineer B's approval, whether the result of inadequate review or insufficient domain competence, effectively laundered Engineer A's deficient work product by attaching to it the imprimatur of federal agency engineering review. This made the deficiency harder to detect and easier to overlook, and it may have discouraged contractors from scrutinizing the documents as carefully as they otherwise might have. The ethical injury from Engineer B's approval was therefore not merely parallel to Engineer A's violation but multiplicative of it.
From a deontological perspective, Engineer A's conduct cannot be justified by his belief that no harm would ultimately result. Deontological ethics evaluates the moral permissibility of an act by reference to the nature of the act and the duties it implicates, not by reference to the actor's predictions about consequences. The act of signing and sealing drawings is, by professional convention and code, a representation that the documents are complete and conform to applicable standards. Engineer A knew this representation was false when he made it. His belief that federal funds would cover cost overruns is irrelevant to the deontological analysis because it speaks only to his prediction of consequences, not to the character of the act itself. A duty of honest professional representation is categorical — it applies regardless of whether the engineer believes the deception will cause harm. The Board's rejection of the benevolent motive defense is therefore fully consistent with deontological reasoning: good intentions about outcomes cannot transform a dishonest act into an honest one.
From a consequentialist perspective, Engineer A's rationalization was analytically deficient even on its own terms. A consequentialist justification for non-disclosure requires that the engineer have adequately surveyed the full range of foreseeable harms and concluded that the expected benefits outweigh them. Engineer A's reasoning considered only one potential harm — increased project cost — and only one potential remedy — federal fund absorption. He failed to account for the foreseeable harm to procurement fairness caused by asking contractors to bid on unknowable scope; the risk of project delay and disruption when deficiencies were discovered post-award; the waste of public funds on a procurement process that would need to be substantially renegotiated; the erosion of public trust in engineering professionals and federal grant programs; and the possibility that the federal agency might not in fact absorb the costs, leaving the local public agency exposed. A consequentialist analysis that ignores these foreseeable harms is not a good-faith consequentialist analysis — it is a motivated rationalization dressed in consequentialist language.
From a virtue ethics perspective, Engineer B's approval of the incomplete drawings reflects deficiencies in at least three professional virtues: diligence, intellectual honesty, and professional courage. Diligence required that he conduct a substantive review adequate to detect the incompleteness that Engineer C later identified at a pre-construction conference — a review that, if conducted competently, should have surfaced the same deficiencies. Intellectual honesty required that he recognize and acknowledge the limits of his own domain competence, if those limits prevented him from conducting an adequate review, rather than proceeding as though his approval carried a weight of verification it did not actually possess. Professional courage required that he be willing to return deficient documents to Engineer A with a deficiency notice, even if doing so created friction with the submitting engineer or delayed the federal approval process. The absence of all three virtues from Engineer B's conduct suggests not merely a technical code violation but a deeper failure of professional character that the Board's conclusion, while correct, does not fully illuminate.
From a deontological perspective, Engineer C's dual status as both a licensed professional engineer and a contractor created a categorical professional duty to disclose known constructability deficiencies before submitting his bid, rather than after winning the contract. A licensed engineer who reviews documents in connection with a bid and identifies conditions he professionally judges to be unbuildable is not merely a contractor making a business calculation about risk — he is a professional engineer who has formed a professional judgment about the adequacy of engineering documents. That professional judgment carries with it a duty of disclosure that is independent of, and not suspended by, the competitive bidding context. The timing of Engineer C's disclosure — raised only at the pre-construction conference after the contract was awarded — suggests that he used his professional knowledge to evaluate the risk to his own firm while withholding that same professional knowledge from the agency and the other bidders who lacked his engineering expertise. This selective deployment of professional judgment for private competitive advantage, while withholding it from the public agency that needed it, is inconsistent with the duties that accompany a professional engineering license.
The tension between Engineer C's constructability disclosure obligation and the discretionary whistleblowing framework recognized in BER Case No. 82-5 is real but resolvable in favor of mandatory disclosure in this case. BER Case No. 82-5 treated disclosure of non-safety deficiencies — specifically, excessive costs and time delays by subcontractors — as a matter of personal conscience rather than mandatory professional duty, in part because the engineer in that case was an employee whose disclosure would have required him to act against his employer's interests. Engineer C's situation is materially different in two respects. First, Engineer C is not an employee being asked to act against his employer; he is an independent contractor-engineer whose disclosure obligation runs to the public agency, not to a superior. Second, and more importantly, Engineer C's knowledge of the unbuildable conditions was not incidental background knowledge — it was knowledge he formed in his professional capacity as a licensed engineer while evaluating documents for a public procurement. The professional engineering license creates obligations that persist regardless of the commercial context in which professional judgment is exercised. The discretionary character of whistleblowing in BER 82-5 does not extend to cases where the engineer's own professional evaluation of documents is the source of the knowledge that needs to be disclosed.
If Engineer A had refused to submit the drawings by the contractual deadline and instead requested a schedule extension to complete the design properly, this course of action would have been not merely permissible but ethically required under the NSPE Code. The Code's prohibition on signing or sealing plans not in conformity with applicable engineering standards is not qualified by a schedule-compliance exception. An engineer who cannot complete a design to professional standards within a contractual timeframe has an obligation to disclose that fact to his client and seek relief — whether in the form of a schedule extension, a scope reduction, or additional resources — rather than to deliver a deficient product on time. The argument that refusing to meet a deadline would have jeopardized federal funding, while practically significant, does not alter the ethical analysis: the Code does not permit an engineer to compromise professional standards to preserve a client's funding timeline. Had Engineer A taken this course, Engineer B's approval dilemma would not have arisen, and Engineer C would have received either complete documents or no documents at all — either of which would have been ethically preferable to the situation that actually occurred.
If Engineer B had recognized the limits of his competence or the incompleteness of the submitted documents and returned the drawings to Engineer A with a formal deficiency notice, the cascade of ethical violations that followed would very likely have been interrupted at that point. The project would not have proceeded to competitive bidding on deficient documents; Engineer C would not have faced the dilemma of bidding on an unbuildable project; and the public agency would have been forced to confront the incompleteness of the design before committing public funds to a procurement. Engineer B's role in the process was therefore not merely one of three parallel violations but a critical control point whose failure allowed Engineer A's initial violation to propagate through the entire procurement chain. This observation underscores the systemic importance of competent independent review in federally funded public projects: the review function is not a formality but a substantive safeguard whose integrity is essential to the integrity of the entire procurement process. Engineer B's failure was not merely an individual ethical lapse but a systemic failure with consequences that extended well beyond his own conduct.
If Engineer C had formally notified the local public agency of the constructability deficiencies and requested a clarification or addendum before submitting his bid, this action would have discharged his ethical obligations as a licensed engineer and would likely have triggered a re-evaluation of the entire procurement. Such notification would have placed the agency on formal notice that the documents were deficient, potentially requiring suspension of the bidding process, issuance of corrective addenda, or re-advertisement of the project on corrected documents. While this course of action would have disadvantaged Engineer C competitively — by alerting other bidders to deficiencies they might not have independently identified, and by potentially delaying the award — the competitive disadvantage does not constitute an ethical justification for withholding the disclosure. The NSPE Code does not recognize competitive self-interest as a basis for suspending professional disclosure obligations. Moreover, had Engineer C taken this course, he would have performed a public service by surfacing deficiencies that Engineer A concealed and Engineer B failed to detect, potentially saving the public agency and the federal funding authority from the costs of a failed procurement.
It was not ethical for Engineer C, owner of the Hi-Lo Construction firm, to submit a bid on a construction contract that he later characterized as “unbuildable” without major changes.
The tension between the Faithful Agent Notification Obligation — which bound Engineer A to deliver drawings and specifications on the contractually agreed schedule — and the Public Welfare Paramount principle — which required him to withhold or qualify documents whose incompleteness could endanger public safety on a dam project — was resolved decisively in favor of public welfare and honest representation. The Board's reasoning makes clear that schedule pressure is not a recognized mitigating factor under the NSPE Code; it is instead an occasion that triggers, rather than suspends, the engineer's affirmative duty to disclose. Engineer A's obligation to serve his client faithfully did not license him to serve that client with deficient work product, and the faithful agent role itself presupposes honest communication about the state of the deliverable. Where the two principles appeared to conflict, the conflict was illusory: a faithful agent who conceals known deficiencies is not serving his client at all. The case therefore teaches that the Faithful Agent Notification Obligation and the Public Welfare Paramount principle are not genuinely opposed — they converge on the same required action, namely transparent disclosure of incompleteness — and that any apparent tension between them dissolves once the engineer recognizes that concealment is never a permissible form of client service.
The Responsible Charge Integrity principle — which demands that an engineer seal only complete and conforming documents — and the Competence Boundary Recognition and Escalation Obligation imposed on Engineer B interacted in a way that compounded rather than checked each other's failure. Engineer A's seal on incomplete drawings created a facially authoritative document that Engineer B's approval then ratified, producing a layered misrepresentation: the local public agency, the federal funding authority, and ultimately the bidding contractors were all entitled to infer from the combination of Engineer A's seal and Engineer B's approval that two independent competent professionals had verified the documents' adequacy. In reality, neither had done so honestly. This case teaches that the professional sealing and approval system is structurally dependent on each participant exercising genuine independent judgment; when one engineer abdicates that responsibility, a downstream approver who fails to exercise independent scrutiny does not merely commit a separate violation — he amplifies the original violation by lending it additional apparent legitimacy. The ethical injury caused by Engineer B's approval was therefore not simply additive but multiplicative, because it foreclosed the last institutional checkpoint before public procurement. The resolution implied by the Board is that Responsible Charge Integrity and Competence Boundary Recognition are complementary, not competing: each engineer in a review chain must exercise independent judgment precisely because no prior seal can be assumed to have been honestly applied.
The Benevolent Motive Non-Cure principle — applied by the Board to reject Engineer A's rationalization that federal funds would absorb any cost overruns — stands in direct tension with a consequentialist reading of the Funding Source Non-Determinative principle, but the Board resolved that tension by adopting a deontological priority: the wrongfulness of submitting sealed incomplete documents is determined by the act itself and the engineer's knowledge at the time, not by the downstream financial outcome the engineer hoped would materialize. Engineer A's genuine belief that no local funds would be harmed did not transform a deceptive act into an honest one, because the Honesty in Professional Representations principle and the Fraud and Misrepresentation Prohibition operate at the moment of submission, not at the moment of financial settlement. This resolution carries a significant teaching for principle prioritization: when an engineer's benevolent motive is used to justify non-disclosure rather than to supplement disclosure, it becomes a rationalization that the Code cannot recognize without effectively licensing engineers to substitute their private cost predictions for transparent professional communication. The case therefore establishes that good-faith assumptions about harm mitigation can never substitute for affirmative disclosure, and that the Benevolent Motive Non-Cure principle functions as a categorical constraint on consequentialist self-exemption from honesty obligations.
The Engineer-Contractor Dual Role Constructability Disclosure Obligation imposed on Engineer C — requiring him to flag unbuildable conditions before bidding — and the Whistleblowing Personal Conscience Right recognized in BER Case No. 82-5 — which treats disclosure of non-safety deficiencies as discretionary rather than mandatory — were resolved by the Board in a manner that distinguishes the two on the basis of role, not merely on the basis of harm severity. In BER Case No. 82-5, the engineer was an employee observing misconduct by others and was not himself a participant in the deficient transaction; his disclosure obligation was therefore framed as a matter of personal conscience. Engineer C, by contrast, was an active participant in the procurement: he submitted a bid on documents he had evaluated and found unbuildable, thereby lending his professional credibility to a transaction he privately regarded as defective. The Board's resolution implies that the discretionary whistleblowing framework of BER Case No. 82-5 does not apply when the engineer is not a bystander but a principal whose own bid submission constitutes an implicit representation that the project is executable. The case teaches that the dual role of engineer-contractor triggers a heightened and mandatory disclosure obligation that supersedes the discretionary personal conscience framework, because the contractor's bid is itself a professional representation about constructability — and submitting that bid while privately knowing the project is unbuildable violates the Honesty in Professional Representations principle regardless of whether public safety is immediately at risk.
The Technically Unsupported Client Heightened Disclosure Obligation — which recognized that the local public agency lacked the in-house technical capacity to evaluate Engineer A's drawings and specifications — interacted with the Professional Accountability principle to establish that Engineer A's ethical duties were not merely symmetrical with those owed to a sophisticated client but were affirmatively elevated by the client's vulnerability. This interaction reveals a structural principle of the NSPE Code: the engineer's disclosure and completeness obligations scale with the client's incapacity to self-protect. Where a client can independently verify the engineer's work product, the engineer's concealment of deficiencies is harmful but the client retains some residual capacity for self-correction; where the client is wholly dependent on the engineer's professional judgment, concealment eliminates the last available check on the engineer's conduct. The case therefore teaches that the Technically Unsupported Client Heightened Disclosure Obligation is not a separate or supplementary principle but a contextual intensifier of the baseline honesty and completeness obligations — and that Engineer A's failure to disclose was more serious, not less, precisely because his client had no independent means of discovering the deficiency. This principle interaction also implies that Engineer A's marketing representations, which secured the contract through an impressive brochure and personal interview, created an expectation of professional adequacy that the local agency was structurally unable to verify, making the gap between representation and delivery an aggravated rather than ordinary ethical violation.
it is pointed out by Engineer C, owner of Hi-Lo Construction, that much of the design detail is lacking in the drawings and specifications
certain parts of the project are 'unbuildable' without major changes
Engineer A (design phase); Engineer C/Hi-Lo Construction (identified deficiencies at pre-construction conference)
The case illustrates the failure to conduct adequate constructability review during design — the contractor identified major constructability deficiencies at the pre-construction conference that should have been identified and resolved during the design phase
Current Case Comparative Precedent Distinguishing from BER 82-5
During Board's ethical analysis of current case
Unlike Case No. 82-5, this case does not involve a conflict with the ethical requirement of confidentiality, but concerns the affirmative responsibility of engineers to complete plans in conformity with applicable engineering standards and avoid deceptive acts
Comparative Case Precedent Distinguishing State
Board's analysis distinguishing current case from BER Case No. 82-5
Board's identification of key distinctions (no confidentiality conflict; affirmative design completion obligation)
As in Case No. 82-5, the issue does not allege a danger to public health or safety
Board's citation of BER Case No. 82-5 as potentially applicable precedent
Current Case Ethics Code Non-Narrow Public-Funds Scope Recognition
The Board considered whether to dismiss the case because it did not involve a danger to public health or safety, ultimately rejecting that narrow reading and applying the Code to the affirmative responsibilities of engineers to complete plans and avoid deceptive acts.
NSPE Board of Ethical Review (adjudicatory body)
Ethics Code Non-Narrow Public-Funds Scope Recognition Obligation
The Board was obligated to recognize that the NSPE Code applies to claims of unsatisfactory plans and unjustified expenditure of public funds even absent a direct danger to public health or safety, and to refrain from dismissing the ethics complaint on the narrow ground that no safety danger was alleged.
The Board indicated that it could dismiss the case on the narrow ground that the NSPE Code does not apply to a claim not involving public health and safety, but that was too narrow a reading of the ethical duties of engineers engaged in such activities.
At the time of adjudicating the ethics complaint
Current Case Non-Safety Public Fund Waste Reporting Discretion
As in Case No. 82-5, the issue does not allege a danger to public health or safety, but is premised upon a claim of unsatisfactory plans and the unjustified expenditure of public funds
Current case facts involving incomplete plans and public fund expenditure
Submission of incomplete plans on a publicly funded project without safety danger
Should Engineer A disclose to the local public agency that the signed and sealed drawings are materially incomplete before submitting them for federal review, or proceed with submission without disclosure on the grounds that schedule pressure and expected federal funding make disclosure unnecessary?
Engineer A, having delivered signed and sealed dam design drawings and specifications he knew to be materially incomplete, must decide whether to affirmatively disclose that incompleteness to the local public agency before or at the time of submission — recognizing that the agency lacked any in-house technical capacity to detect deficiencies independently, that schedule pressure from the contract deadline was the proximate cause of the incompleteness, and that he privately assumed federal funds would absorb any resulting cost overruns.
Formally notify the local public agency in writing, before submitting the documents for federal review, that the drawings and specifications are materially incomplete, identify the specific deficiencies, explain that schedule pressure prevented completion, and request either a deadline extension or explicit agency direction on how to proceed — declining to seal documents that cannot be certified as professionally adequate.
Submit the signed and sealed drawings on schedule without disclosing their incompleteness, on the basis that anticipated federal grant funds will cover any cost overruns and that the federal review process will serve as an independent check on document adequacy before competitive bidding proceeds.
Submit the drawings on schedule but annotate the seal or cover letter with a notation that certain design details remain to be developed, treating the submission as a design-development package rather than a complete construction document set, and relying on the federal reviewer to determine whether the documents are sufficient for bidding purposes.
Should Engineer A disclose the known incompleteness of the drawings to the local public agency before submitting them for federal review, or proceed with submission under the assumption that federal funds will absorb any resulting cost overruns?
Engineer A: Heightened Disclosure Obligation to Technically Unsupported Client on Incomplete Dam Design Documents
Formally notify the local public agency in writing of the known deficiencies and the schedule pressure causing them before submitting the drawings for federal review, giving the agency the opportunity to grant an extension, reduce scope, or provide informed consent to proceed — and decline to seal documents that cannot be certified as complete.
Proceed with submission of the signed and sealed drawings on schedule, relying on the established federal funding commitment to absorb any cost overruns that result from the incomplete design, without prior written disclosure to the agency — treating the funding mechanism as a professional backstop that neutralizes the risk of incompleteness.
Submit the drawings on schedule but attach an explicit written qualification to the seal identifying the sections known to be incomplete and the reasons therefor, treating the qualified seal as a partial disclosure that preserves the funding timeline while alerting downstream reviewers to the deficiencies.
Should Engineer C disclose the constructability deficiencies to the local public agency before submitting his bid, or submit the bid and raise the unbuildability concerns only after winning the contract at the pre-construction conference?
Engineer C: Mandatory Pre-Bid Constructability Disclosure vs. Discretionary Whistleblowing Right When Dual Role Engineer-Contractor Identifies Unbuildable Conditions Involving Public Funds
Before submitting a bid, formally notify the local public agency in writing of the identified constructability deficiencies and request a clarification or corrective addendum, accepting the competitive disadvantage of alerting other bidders and potentially triggering a re-evaluation of the entire procurement.
Submit the low bid without prior disclosure, treating the constructability concerns as a contractor's internal risk assessment and business judgment, and raise the unbuildability issues at the pre-construction conference after contract award — relying on the BER Case No. 82-5 framework that treats disclosure of non-safety deficiencies as a matter of personal conscience rather than mandatory professional duty.
Decline to submit a bid on documents professionally judged to be unbuildable, and notify the public agency of the deficiencies without entering the competitive procurement — preserving professional integrity while avoiding the competitive-advantage conflict that arises from bidding on documents the engineer privately regards as defective.
Should Engineer B conduct a substantive independent technical review of the submitted drawings before approving them on behalf of the federal government — escalating or returning deficient documents if his domain competence is insufficient — or approve the drawings as a procedural funding-eligibility determination without independent verification of engineering completeness?
Engineer B: Substantive Competence Review vs. Procedural Approval of Incomplete Federal Dam Design Documents
Perform a genuine independent technical review of the dam design documents adequate to detect engineering deficiencies, and if domain-specific competence is insufficient to complete that review, escalate to a qualified dam-design specialist or return the documents to Engineer A with a formal deficiency notice before approving them for competitive bidding.
Approve the signed and sealed drawings as a procedural determination that the submission satisfies federal funding eligibility requirements — treating Engineer A's professional seal as sufficient evidence of engineering adequacy and limiting the federal review function to administrative compliance rather than independent substantive verification.
Conduct a standard general engineering plan review using established federal agency checklist procedures, approving the documents if they satisfy the formal criteria without separately engaging a dam-design specialist — relying on the submitting engineer's seal as the primary professional certification of completeness and treating the federal review as a second-level quality check rather than an independent engineering evaluation.
Should Engineer C disclose the constructability deficiencies and unbuildable elements he identified in the bidding documents to the local public agency before submitting his bid, or submit the low bid without disclosure and raise those concerns only after winning the contract?
Engineer C, owner of Hi-Lo Construction and a licensed professional engineer, reviewed the dam project bidding documents, formed a professional judgment that significant portions of the design were incomplete and that certain elements were unbuildable without major changes, and then submitted the low bid without disclosing those concerns — raising the unbuildability claim only at the pre-construction conference after the contract had been awarded to his firm.
Before submitting a bid, formally notify the local public agency of the specific constructability deficiencies and unbuildable elements identified through professional review of the bidding documents, request a clarification or corrective addendum, and either await resolution before bidding or include explicit bid items for the additional design and construction work required to complete the project as buildable.
Submit the low bid on the documents as issued, treating the constructability concerns as a contractor's risk assessment and business judgment, and raise the unbuildability issues at the pre-construction conference after contract award when the scope and cost implications can be negotiated directly with the agency.
Submit a bid that includes explicit contingency line items or allowances reflecting the additional design development and construction work that the incomplete documents will foreseeably require, without separately notifying the agency of the deficiencies, on the basis that the bid itself signals the document inadequacy through its pricing structure.
Should Engineer B conduct and rely on his own review of Engineer A's dam design documents before approving and sealing them, or recognize the limits of his domain competence or the documents' inadequacy and escalate to a qualified specialist or return the documents with a deficiency notice before approving?
Engineer B, employed by the federal funding agency, was assigned to review, approve, sign, and seal Engineer A's dam design drawings and specifications as a condition of grant funding. He approved the documents — which were materially incomplete and contained unbuildable elements — either through a superficial review that failed to detect the deficiencies or through a review that exceeded his domain-specific technical competence, without escalating to a more qualified reviewer or returning the documents with a deficiency notice.
Upon recognizing either that the documents contain material deficiencies detectable through competent review or that the review assignment exceeds his own domain-specific technical competence, decline to approve and seal the documents, and either return them to Engineer A with a formal deficiency notice identifying the incomplete elements or escalate the review to a supervisor or domain-qualified specialist within the federal agency.
Conduct a general engineering review of the submitted documents at the level of competence available within the assigned role, approve and seal the documents upon finding no facially apparent violations of applicable standards, and treat the federal approval as a funding-eligibility determination rather than an independent certification of design completeness — consistent with the institutional scope of the federal review function.
Approve the documents for bidding purposes while attaching a formal notation to the approval identifying areas of apparent incompleteness that the design engineer should address before construction commences, thereby preserving the project timeline while placing the agency and bidders on notice that the documents are not fully developed — treating the approval as conditional rather than unconditional.
Should Engineer A formally disclose the known incompleteness of the drawings to the local public agency and federal authority before submitting them under seal, or proceed with submission on schedule and rely on federal funds to absorb any resulting cost overruns?
Engineer A: Disclosure of Known Incompleteness Before Submitting Sealed Drawings for Federal Review
Formally notify the local public agency and federal authority in writing of the known incompleteness, decline to seal the drawings until they conform to applicable standards, and request a schedule extension or scope adjustment — accepting the risk that federal funding timelines may be disrupted.
Provide written notification to the local public agency disclosing the known incompleteness and citing schedule pressure as the cause, then submit the drawings under seal with the client's informed authorization — reasoning that written disclosure transfers decision-making authority to the client and satisfies the faithful agent obligation even if the seal is applied to incomplete documents.
Submit the signed and sealed drawings by the contractual deadline without prior disclosure, on the private reasoning that federal grant funds will cover any cost overruns caused by the incomplete design — preserving the funding commitment and the client's project timeline while deferring resolution of deficiencies to the construction phase.
Should Engineer B conduct — or escalate for — a substantive independent technical review of the submitted drawings before approving them on behalf of the federal government, or treat his role as a procedural funding-eligibility clearance and approve the documents as submitted?
Engineer B: Substantive Review vs. Procedural Approval of Incomplete Federal Drawings
Perform a domain-competent independent technical review of the submitted drawings sufficient to detect material deficiencies, or — if lacking the requisite dam-design expertise — formally escalate the submission to a qualified specialist or return the drawings to Engineer A with a written deficiency notice before any approval is issued.
Review the drawings using the federal agency's standard plan-review checklist and procedures — the same process applied to all submissions — and approve them upon finding no facial deficiencies, on the basis that the submitting engineer's seal provides the primary professional certification of completeness and the agency's role is to verify regulatory eligibility rather than to re-engineer the design.
Issue a conditional approval that flags identified or suspected areas of concern in writing to Engineer A and the local public agency, allowing the procurement to proceed on schedule while formally placing the parties on notice that the approval does not constitute independent verification of completeness — thereby preserving the funding timeline while limiting the epistemic authority attributed to the federal stamp.
Should Engineer C formally disclose the constructability deficiencies he identified in the drawings to the local public agency before submitting his bid, or submit a competitive bid and raise the unbuildability concerns only after winning the contract?
Engineer C: Pre-Bid Disclosure of Constructability Deficiencies vs. Competitive Bid Submission
Formally notify the local public agency in writing of the identified constructability deficiencies and request a clarification or corrective addendum before submitting any bid — accepting the competitive disadvantage of alerting other bidders and potentially triggering a procurement re-evaluation, on the basis that the professional engineering license imposes a categorical disclosure duty that survives the contractor role.
Submit a competitive bid that prices the work as documented, then raise the constructability deficiencies at the pre-construction conference after contract award — reasoning that the deficiencies were not fully crystallized until post-bid review, that the contractor role does not impose pre-bid disclosure obligations beyond those owed by any other bidder, and that the appropriate forum for resolving design deficiencies is the pre-construction process rather than the competitive bidding phase.
Withdraw from the procurement entirely without submitting a bid, on the basis that submitting any bid on documents privately regarded as unbuildable would constitute an implicit misrepresentation — while stopping short of affirmative disclosure to the agency, treating the decision as a matter of personal professional conscience consistent with the discretionary framework of BER Case No. 82-5 for non-safety deficiencies.
Should Engineer A disclose the known incompleteness of the drawings to the client and federal agency before submission, or proceed to sign, seal, and submit the incomplete documents on schedule while relying on federal funds to absorb any resulting cost overruns?
Engineer A Dam Design Engineer: Disclosure and Sealing Obligation When Facing Schedule Pressure on Incomplete Dam Design Documents
Formally notify the local public agency and the federal funding authority in writing of the known incompleteness, decline to sign and seal the drawings until they conform to applicable standards, and request a schedule extension or scope relief — accepting the risk to the funding timeline as the ethically required consequence.
Provide written notice to the client and federal agency of the known gaps before submission, then proceed to sign and seal the drawings on schedule with the client's informed authorization, treating written disclosure as sufficient to satisfy professional obligations while preserving the funding timeline.
Sign, seal, and submit the incomplete drawings on the contractual deadline without prior disclosure, relying on the established federal funding commitment to absorb any cost overruns that result from the design gaps, and address incompleteness through the change-order process post-award.
Should Engineer C formally disclose the constructability deficiencies to the public agency before submitting his bid, or submit a competitive low bid on the deficient documents and raise the unbuildability claim only after winning the contract?
Engineer C Engineer-Contractor Dual Role: Pre-Bid Constructability Disclosure Obligation When Bidding on Documents Identified as Unbuildable
Formally notify the local public agency in writing of the identified constructability deficiencies and request a clarification or corrective addendum before submitting any bid, accepting the competitive disadvantage that alerting other bidders to the deficiencies may create.
Submit a competitive bid that explicitly notes, in the bid documents themselves, that the design contains constructability concerns requiring resolution before construction can proceed, thereby disclosing the professional judgment without withdrawing from the procurement.
Submit a low bid on the documents as advertised, treating constructability concerns as a contractor's normal risk assessment and business judgment, and raise the unbuildability claim through the standard pre-construction conference process after contract award when scope renegotiation is contractually available.
Should Engineer B conduct a substantive independent technical review of the submitted drawings — escalating to a domain specialist or returning deficient documents to Engineer A if competence limits are reached — or approve the documents as submitted based on the procedural funding-eligibility scope of his federal review role?
Engineer B Federal Plan Approval Engineer: Substantive Review Obligation Versus Procedural Approval When Evaluating Incomplete Dam Design Documents for Federal Funding Clearance
Perform a genuine independent technical review of the submitted drawings adequate to detect completeness deficiencies; if domain-specific competence in dam design is insufficient to conduct that review, escalate to a qualified specialist or return the documents to Engineer A with a formal deficiency notice before approving.
Conduct the review within the institutionally defined scope of federal funding-eligibility clearance — verifying that the submission is complete as a package and bears a licensed engineer's seal — without independently re-evaluating the technical adequacy of the design, in reliance on Engineer A's professional certification.
Issue a conditional approval that flags identified or suspected areas of incompleteness as requiring resolution before construction documents are finalized, thereby advancing the funding timeline while formally placing the agency and Engineer A on notice that the documents require further development.
Engineer-Contractor Dual Role Constructability Disclosure Obligation Invoked Against Engineer C
Bid submission on dam project with known or discoverable design deficiencies
Competitive Employment Freedom With Confidentiality Constraint
Free and Open Competition as Engineering Ethics Boundary Condition
Engineer C, as both a licensed engineer and the low-bid contractor, submitted a bid on a project with design documents that — as an engineer — he should have been capable of identifying as materially incomplete and unbuildable, and raised these concerns only at the pre-construction conference rather than prior to or at bid submission
Engineer C's engineering credentials created a professional obligation to apply engineering judgment to the bid documents and disclose known constructability deficiencies before submitting a bid, not to exploit superior knowledge by bidding low and raising concerns only after contract award
Engineer C Unbuildable Contract Bidding Engineer-Contractor
Engineer-Contractor Dual Role Constructability Disclosure Obligation
At the pre-construction conference, it is pointed out by Engineer C, owner of Hi-Lo Construction, that much of the design detail is lacking in the drawings and specifications and that Hi-Lo Construction declares that certain parts of the project are 'unbuildable' without major changes.
The engineer's professional obligations do not disappear in the contractor role; Engineer C was required to disclose known constructability deficiencies before or at bid submission, not to exploit them competitively
{'license': 'Professional Engineer (implied by sealed drawings)', 'specialty': 'Dam and infrastructure design', 'ethical_failure': 'Deliberate non-disclosure of known design incompleteness; sealing deficient documents'}
Responded to RFP, won contract for dam design drawings and specifications, delivered knowingly incomplete documents under schedule pressure without disclosing incompleteness to client or approving authority, rationalized deficiency by expecting federal contingency funds to cover cost overruns
{'type': 'confronted_by', 'target': 'Engineer C Hi-Lo Construction Contractor'}
{'type': 'serves_client', 'target': 'Local Public Agency Client'}
{'type': 'submitted_to', 'target': 'Engineer B Federal Approval Engineer'}
Incomplete Deliverable Concealing Design Engineer
Engineer A responds to an RFP from a small local public agency
Engineer A generally agrees with Hi-Lo's characterization, but in his defense responds that he felt pressured to deliver the drawings and specifications on a specified date, but did not inform anyone as to their incompleteness
Engineer A was confident that sufficient federal funds (and not local funding) would cover any potential increased costs
Engineer A's firm's impressive brochure and personal interview results in the award of a contract
Engineer A Deadline-Pressured Premature Submission
From the point Engineer A recognized the drawings were incomplete through the submission date
he felt pressured to deliver the drawings and specifications on a specified date, but did not inform anyone as to their incompleteness
Deadline-Pressured Premature Deliverable Submission State
Engineer A's response to contractual delivery deadline
Submission of incomplete documents (state resolved by non-compliant action rather than proper resolution)
Specified delivery date for drawings and specifications with Engineer A's awareness of incompleteness
Engineer A Ethics Code Non-Narrow Scope Self-Application Dam Design
Ethics Code Non-Narrow Public-Funds Scope Self-Application Capability
Engineer A should have possessed the capability to recognize that the NSPE Code's affirmative obligations — including completing plans per engineering standards and avoiding deceptive acts — applied to his dam design work even absent a direct public safety emergency, and that the public-funds context did not narrow his ethical duties.
Dam design project for local public agency with federal funding; Engineer A delivered incomplete drawings and specifications.
Failure to apply this capability: Engineer A delivered incomplete sealed documents and offered a federal-funds rationalization, demonstrating non-recognition of the Code's full scope of application.
Engineer A Federal Funding Cost-Coverage Rationalization
From Engineer A's decision not to disclose incompleteness through pre-construction conference
Federal Funding Cost-Coverage Rationalization State
Engineer A's justification for non-disclosure of known incompleteness
Pre-construction conference exposing the deficiency; rationalization becomes untenable
Engineer A's belief that federal funds would cover cost overruns from incomplete design
Engineer A Federal Funding Rationalization Non-Excuse Dam Project
Engineer A rationalized non-disclosure of known incompleteness by assuming federal funds (rather than local funds) would cover resulting cost overruns, treating third-party cost absorption as a substitute for professional disclosure obligations.
Anticipated Third-Party Funding Cost-Coverage Non-Excuse for Incomplete Deliverable Constraint
Engineer A was constrained from treating his assumption that federal grant funds would cover cost overruns as a justification for delivering incomplete drawings and specifications without disclosing their incompleteness to the local public agency client.
NSPE Code of Ethics — prohibition on misrepresentation and dishonesty in professional dealings; faithful agent duty to client
While much of the information was missing from the drawings and specifications, Engineer A was confident that sufficient federal funds (and not local funding) would cover any potential increased costs.
At and before the time of delivery of signed and sealed drawings and specifications
Engineer A Federal Funds Rationalization Fraud Misrepresentation
Engineer A asserted that the incomplete design was acceptable because federal funds would be awarded to complete the work, which the Board characterized as bordering on fraud and misrepresentation.
Funding Source Non-Excuse for Incomplete Deliverable Disclosure Obligation
Engineer A was obligated to recognize that an expectation of future federal funding to complete incomplete work did not constitute an ethical justification for delivering incomplete design documents without disclosure, and that asserting such a justification bordered on fraud and misrepresentation.
Engineer A's bold assertion that the work was incomplete, but that this was due to time pressures and his expectation that Federal funds would be awarded to complete the work is wholly unconvincing.
At the time of delivery and in subsequent professional justification of the incomplete delivery
Engineer A's comment about Federal funds borders on fraud and misrepresentation and is a clear violation of the NSPE Code.
Engineer A Federal Funds Rationalization Fraud Recognition Dam Design
Federal Funds Rationalization Fraud Recognition Capability
Engineer A should have possessed the capability to recognize that his assertion that federal funds would cover costs from incomplete design work crossed from an insufficient professional justification into conduct bordering on fraud and misrepresentation — a clear violation of the NSPE Code.
Engineer A's post-delivery justification for delivering incomplete dam design drawings and specifications.
Failure to apply this capability: Engineer A asserted that federal funds would be awarded to complete the incomplete work, a rationalization the Board characterized as bordering on fraud and misrepresentation.
Engineer A Formal Client Risk Notification Dam Design
Engineer A, as the design engineer and faithful agent of the local public agency, knew the documents were incomplete and that parts of the project were unbuildable, but failed to formally advise the client of this risk.
Formal Client Project Failure Risk Notification Obligation
Engineer A was obligated to formally notify the local public agency in writing that the design documents were incomplete and that the project as delivered could not be successfully constructed without major changes, so that the client had clear notice of the project's risk.
At or before delivery of the incomplete drawings and specifications
Engineer A Formal Written Project Failure Risk Advisory Failure
Formal Written Project Failure Risk Advisory Capability
Engineer A failed to formally advise the local public agency in writing that the design documents were incomplete and that proceeding with the project as designed created material risk of project failure, cost overruns, and construction impossibility
Engineer A was obligated to formally notify the client in writing of the incomplete nature of the design documents and the associated project risks
Engineer A delivered incomplete documents without any written advisory to the client regarding the risks of proceeding with incomplete design, leaving the client uninformed until the pre-construction conference
Engineer A Full-Service Dam Design Complete Delivery Obligation
Engineer A delivered incomplete dam design drawings and specifications under a full-service contract, asserting that time pressures and expected federal funding justified the incomplete delivery.
Full-Service Contract Complete Design Delivery Obligation
Engineer A, retained under a full-service engineering design contract for a dam project, was obligated to deliver a complete set of design drawings and specifications adequate for construction, and was not permitted to deliver knowingly incomplete documents on the grounds of schedule pressure or an expectation that federal funds would complete the work.
At the time of delivery of design drawings and specifications to the client and federal agency
Engineer A Full-Service Dam Design Complete Delivery Self-Assessment
Sealed Document Completeness Pre-Certification Self-Assessment Capability
Engineer A should have possessed the capability to conduct a rigorous self-assessment of the completeness of the dam design drawings and specifications before signing and sealing them, recognizing that the full-service contract required complete design delivery and that sealing incomplete documents constituted a professional certification of adequacy he could not honestly make.
Engineer A's delivery of signed and sealed dam design drawings and specifications under a full-service engineering design contract.
Failure to apply this capability: Engineer A signed and sealed materially incomplete dam design drawings and specifications, delivering them without disclosure of their incompleteness.
Engineer A Funding Source Rationalization Dam Design
Engineer A rationalized non-disclosure of document incompleteness by assuming that federal (not local) funds would absorb any resulting cost increases, treating the funding source as determinative of his disclosure obligation.
Engineer A was obligated to recognize that his assumption that federal funds would cover cost overruns from incomplete design documents did not constitute an ethical justification for non-disclosure of those deficiencies to the client.
At the time Engineer A decided not to disclose the incompleteness of the deliverables
Engineer A Funding Source Rationalization Non-Excuse Failure
Funding Source Rationalization Non-Excuse Deliverable Completeness Capability
Engineer A failed to exercise the capability to recognize that his assumption that federal funds would cover cost overruns did not discharge his professional obligation to disclose the incompleteness of the design documents to the client
Engineer A assumed federal funding would absorb cost overruns from incomplete design, using this as implicit justification for non-disclosure
Engineer A rationalized non-disclosure of incomplete documents by assuming federal grant funds would cover any resulting cost overruns, failing to recognize this as an impermissible justification
{'license': 'Professional Engineer', 'specialty': 'Public infrastructure design', 'violation': 'Sealed and submitted knowingly incomplete plans; misrepresented completeness status'}
Prepared, signed, and sealed incomplete design drawings and specifications for a federally-funded public infrastructure project, failed to disclose incompleteness to the client or approving authority, and justified the deficiency by citing time pressures and expectation of future federal funding — conduct the Board characterized as bordering on fraud and misrepresentation.
{'type': 'client', 'target': 'Technically Unsupported Public Infrastructure Client'}
{'type': 'peer', 'target': 'Engineer B Competence-Unrecognizing Plan Approval Engineer'}
{'type': 'peer', 'target': 'Engineer C Unbuildable Contract Bidding Engineer-Contractor'}
Engineer A had an obligation to provide a complete set of design drawings and specifications on the project
Engineer A's bold assertion that the work was incomplete, but that this was due to time pressures and his expectation that Federal funds would be awarded to complete the work is wholly unconvincing
Engineer A's comment about Federal funds borders on fraud and misrepresentation and is a clear violation of the NSPE Code
Engineer A Incomplete Deliverable Disclosure Dam Design
Engineer A delivered signed and sealed dam design drawings and specifications to a small local public agency that lacked in-house technical review capacity, knowing the documents were incomplete, without informing anyone of their incompleteness.
Incomplete Deliverable Disclosure to Client Obligation
Engineer A was obligated to disclose to the local public agency, at or before delivery of the signed and sealed drawings and specifications, that those documents were materially incomplete and that certain parts of the project were unbuildable without major changes.
Engineer A generally agrees with Hi-Lo's characterization, but in his defense responds that he felt pressured to deliver the drawings and specifications on a specified date, but did not inform anyone as to their incompleteness.
At or before the time of delivery of the signed and sealed drawings and specifications
much of the design detail is lacking in the drawings and specifications and that Hi-Lo Construction declares that certain parts of the project are 'unbuildable' without major changes
Engineer A Incomplete Deliverable Self-Disclosure Failure
Incomplete Deliverable Self-Disclosure Capability
Engineer A lacked or failed to exercise the capability to recognize and proactively disclose to the local public agency that the dam design drawings and specifications were materially incomplete before or at the time of delivery
Engineer A delivered incomplete dam design documents under schedule pressure without disclosing their incompleteness to the client
Engineer A delivered signed and sealed drawings and specifications that Hi-Lo Construction later identified as lacking much design detail and containing unbuildable elements, without having disclosed this incompleteness to anyone
much of the design detail is lacking in the drawings and specifications
Engineer A Incomplete Drawings Submission Without Disclosure
From submission of drawings and specifications through pre-construction conference where deficiency was raised
Engineer B (federal approving authority)
Knowingly Incomplete Deliverable Submitted Without Disclosure State
Engineer A's submission of signed and sealed drawings and specifications
Hi-Lo Construction's identification of unbuildable elements at pre-construction conference, forcing acknowledgment
much of the information was missing from the drawings and specifications
Engineer A seals and submits drawings and specifications known to be materially incomplete without informing any party
Engineer A Incomplete Risk Disclosure Dam Project
Engineer A knowingly withheld from all parties the material risk that the design documents were incomplete and that the project as designed was partially unbuildable, allowing the project to proceed through federal approval and competitive bid award without disclosure.
Engineer A was prohibited from omitting from his communications with the client, the federal agency, and the contracting process the known material risk that the drawings and specifications were incomplete and that portions of the project were unbuildable as designed.
NSPE Code of Ethics — prohibition on misrepresentation; faithful agent duty; public safety paramount
From the time Engineer A recognized the incompleteness through project delivery and bid award
Engineer A Knowingly Incomplete Deliverable Submitted
From submission of incomplete plans through post-award discovery of unbuildability
Engineer A had an obligation to provide a complete set of design drawings and specifications
Engineer A's submission of incomplete design drawings and specifications
Post-award discovery by Engineer C that project was unbuildable
Engineer A submitting incomplete plans rationalized by time pressure and expected federal funds
Engineer A Marketing Representation Deliverable Adequacy Dam Project
Engineer A's firm won the contract through an impressive brochure and personal interview, creating reasonable client expectations of professional competence and complete deliverables that were not met by the incomplete and partially unbuildable drawings and specifications ultimately delivered.
Brochure Reader Reasonable Expectation Non-Deception Constraint
Engineer A was constrained from allowing the impressive marketing brochure and interview performance that secured the contract to create a false impression of the firm's capacity to deliver complete and adequate dam design documents, and was required to deliver work product consistent with the qualifications represented.
NSPE Code of Ethics — prohibition on misrepresentation; marketing accuracy obligations
Engineer A's firm's impressive brochure and personal interview results in the award of a contract for the design, drawings, and specifications.
From contract award through delivery of design documents
Engineer A Post-Error Professional Accountability Acceptance
Post-Error Professional Accountability Acceptance Capability
Engineer A was obligated to accept full professional accountability for the incomplete and inadequate dam design documents delivered under his direction, rather than deflecting responsibility to schedule pressure or funding assumptions
At the pre-construction conference, Engineer A acknowledged the incompleteness but offered schedule pressure and funding assumptions as defenses rather than accepting professional accountability
Engineer A's defense at the pre-construction conference cited schedule pressure and federal funding assumptions rather than accepting professional accountability for the incomplete deliverables
Engineer A generally agrees with Hi-Lo's characterization, but in his defense responds that he felt pressured to deliver the drawings and specifications on a specified date
Engineer A Professional Accountability Incomplete Dam Design
Engineer A directed the preparation of and sealed incomplete design documents, then attempted to deflect accountability by citing schedule pressure and federal funding assumptions rather than accepting responsibility for the deficient deliverable.
Professional Accountability Acceptance for Directed Work Obligation
Engineer A was obligated to accept full professional accountability for the incomplete and inadequate dam design documents delivered under his direction and seal, including accountability for the downstream consequences of cost overruns, construction delays, and project disruption.
Upon delivery of the incomplete documents and throughout the pre-construction conference
Engineer A Public Procurement Fairness Incomplete Bid Documents Dam Project
Engineer A's incomplete drawings and specifications were used as the basis for a publicly advertised competitive bid, resulting in a contract award to Hi-Lo Construction on the basis of documents that were materially deficient and partially unbuildable — compromising the fairness and integrity of the procurement process.
Competitive Procurement Fairness Constraint
Engineer A was constrained from allowing materially incomplete and deficient drawings and specifications to be used as the basis for a publicly advertised competitive bid process, as the incompleteness undermined the integrity and fairness of the procurement.
NSPE Code of Ethics — public procurement integrity; faithful agent duty to client; prohibition on misrepresentation
the project is thereafter duly advertised for bids and a contract is awarded to the low bidder, Hi-Lo Construction
Before and during the public advertisement for bids and contract award to Hi-Lo Construction
Engineer A Public Safety Paramount Incomplete Dam Design
A dam is safety-critical public infrastructure; Engineer A's delivery of incomplete and partially unbuildable design documents without disclosure created foreseeable public safety risks that the paramount safety obligation required him to prevent through disclosure and corrective action.
Engineer A was constrained by the paramount obligation to public safety from delivering incomplete and partially unbuildable dam design documents without disclosure, given that a dam is safety-critical infrastructure whose deficient design poses direct risks to public safety.
NSPE Code of Ethics Section I — public safety, health, and welfare paramount
Hi-Lo Construction declares that certain parts of the project are 'unbuildable' without major changes
Throughout the design, delivery, and construction phases of the dam project
Engineer A Responsible Charge Active Engagement Failure Dam Design
Responsible Charge Active Engagement Capability
Engineer A failed to maintain active, substantive engagement in the preparation of the dam design documents sufficient to ensure their completeness and adequacy before signing and sealing them for delivery to the client
Engineer A directed the preparation of incomplete dam design documents and signed and sealed them without ensuring their completeness
Engineer A delivered signed and sealed drawings and specifications that were materially incomplete, indicating that his responsible charge engagement was insufficient to ensure document adequacy
Engineer A's firm's impressive brochure and personal interview results in the award of a contract for the design, drawings, and specifications
Engineer A Schedule Pressure Defense Rejection Dam Design
Engineer A invoked schedule pressure as a defense for delivering incomplete dam design documents without disclosure, which the ethics framework rejects as an insufficient justification.
Schedule Pressure Non-Excuse for Incomplete Deliverable Disclosure Obligation
Engineer A was obligated to recognize that schedule pressure from the contract delivery date did not justify delivering sealed incomplete drawings and specifications without disclosure, and was required to either request a deadline extension, deliver with explicit disclosure of incompleteness, or decline to seal inadequate documents.
At the time Engineer A experienced schedule pressure and chose to deliver incomplete documents without disclosure
Engineer A Schedule Pressure Non-Excuse Incomplete Deliverable
Engineer A cited time pressures as justification for delivering incomplete design drawings and specifications under seal.
Engineer A was obligated to recognize that schedule pressure did not excuse delivery of incomplete dam design documents without disclosure, and was required to either request a deadline extension, deliver partial work with explicit disclosure of its limitations, or decline to seal documents that were not professionally adequate.
At the time of delivery of design drawings and specifications
Engineer A was selected for his expertise, which presumably included Engineer A's ability to fully perform the work based on project time parameters.
Engineer A Schedule Pressure Non-Excuse Sealed Drawings Dam Project
Engineer A delivered signed and sealed dam design drawings and specifications that he acknowledged were incomplete and partially unbuildable, citing schedule pressure as a defense while failing to disclose the incompleteness to anyone.
Schedule Pressure Sealed Deliverable Incompleteness Non-Excuse Constraint
Engineer A was constrained from treating the contractual delivery deadline as a justification for signing, sealing, and delivering drawings and specifications that he knew to be materially incomplete and partially unbuildable without disclosing that incompleteness to the client.
NSPE Code of Ethics — professional obligation of completeness and honesty in professional dealings
Engineer A Schedule Pressure Non-Excuse Self-Regulation Failure
Schedule Pressure Non-Excuse Deliverable Completeness Self-Regulation Capability
Engineer A failed to exercise the capability to recognize that schedule pressure did not justify delivering incomplete sealed documents without disclosure, instead using the delivery deadline as a rationalization for non-disclosure
Engineer A used contractual delivery date pressure as a rationalization for delivering incomplete dam design documents without disclosure
Engineer A cited schedule pressure as a defense for delivering incomplete drawings and specifications without informing anyone of their incompleteness
Engineer A Sealed Document Completeness Dam Design
Engineer A signed and sealed dam design drawings and specifications that he knew to be materially incomplete, thereby implicitly certifying their adequacy to the client, federal agency, and contractors who relied on the seal.
Sealed Document Completeness Certification Accuracy Obligation
Engineer A was obligated to ensure that the dam design drawings and specifications were materially complete and professionally adequate before signing and sealing them, and was prohibited from affixing his professional seal to documents he knew to be incomplete.
The signed and sealed drawings and specifications are ultimately approved by Engineer B of the engineering staff of the federal agency funding the project
At the time of signing and sealing the drawings and specifications
Engineer A Sealed Document Completeness Pre-Certification Failure
Engineer A failed to exercise the capability to conduct an adequate pre-sealing self-assessment of the completeness of the dam design documents, or having conducted such assessment and recognized incompleteness, failed to refrain from sealing or to disclose the deficiencies contemporaneously
Engineer A signed and sealed incomplete dam design drawings and specifications, with the incompleteness only discovered at the pre-construction conference
Engineer A signed and sealed drawings and specifications that he knew or should have known were materially incomplete, without disclosing this to the client
The signed and sealed drawings and specifications are ultimately approved by Engineer B
Engineer A Sealed Drawings Completeness Dam Project
Engineer A signed and sealed drawings and specifications that he acknowledged were incomplete and that the contractor later declared partially unbuildable, violating the responsible charge certification implicit in the sealing act.
Responsible Charge Verification Constraint
Engineer A was constrained from signing and sealing dam design drawings and specifications that he knew to be materially incomplete and partially unbuildable, as the act of sealing certifies that the engineer has exercised responsible charge over complete and adequate work product.
NSPE Code of Ethics; state professional engineering licensing statutes governing responsible charge and seal requirements
Engineer A Sealed Incomplete Documents Completeness Certification Accuracy
Engineer A signed and sealed design drawings and specifications for a dam project that he knew to be materially incomplete.
Engineer A was obligated to ensure that the dam design drawings and specifications were materially complete and professionally adequate before affixing his professional seal, and was prohibited from sealing documents he knew to be incomplete, as the act of sealing constituted an implicit professional certification of adequacy.
At the time of affixing professional seal to the design documents
Engineer A Signed Sealed Document Integrity Significance Recognition Failure
Signed and Sealed Document Integrity Significance Recognition Capability
Engineer A failed to fully internalize and apply the professional significance of signing and sealing engineering documents, specifically that a seal certifies professional adequacy and responsible charge, and that sealing materially incomplete documents misrepresents their status
Engineer A's sealing of incomplete dam design documents without disclosure demonstrates failure to apply the full professional significance of the sealing act
Engineer A signed and sealed drawings and specifications he knew to be materially incomplete, without disclosing this to the client or noting the incompleteness on the documents
Engineer A Technically Unsupported Client Heightened Disclosure Dam Design
The local public agency client had no in-house technical capacity to review the drawings and specifications, placing the entire burden of quality assurance and disclosure on Engineer A as the design professional.
Technically Unsupported Client Heightened Disclosure Obligation
Engineer A was obligated to apply a heightened standard of proactive disclosure regarding the completeness and adequacy of the dam design documents, given that the local public agency lacked in-house technical resources to independently detect deficiencies.
The local public agency does not have the in-house technical resources to review the drawings and specifications.
Throughout the design engagement and at the time of deliverable submission
Engineer A Technically Unsupported Client Heightened Disclosure Dam Project
The local public agency lacked in-house technical resources to review the drawings and specifications, making it entirely dependent on Engineer A's professional integrity to learn of any incompleteness — a dependency that heightened Engineer A's disclosure obligation.
Technically Unsupported Client Proactive Incompleteness Disclosure Constraint
Engineer A was constrained to apply a heightened standard of proactive disclosure of the incompleteness of the dam design documents to the local public agency, given that the agency lacked in-house technical resources to independently detect the deficiencies.
NSPE Code of Ethics — faithful agent duty; prohibition on deception; public safety paramount
Engineer A Technically Unsupported Client Heightened Disclosure Failure
Technically Unsupported Client Heightened Proactive Disclosure Capability
Engineer A failed to apply a heightened proactive disclosure standard appropriate to a client — the local public agency — that lacked in-house technical resources to independently review the design documents for completeness and adequacy
The local public agency lacked in-house technical resources to review the drawings and specifications, creating a heightened disclosure obligation that Engineer A failed to fulfill
Engineer A delivered incomplete documents to a client with no in-house technical review capacity, without disclosing the incompleteness, leaving the client entirely dependent on downstream parties (federal agency, contractor) to discover the deficiency
Engineer A Temporal Constraint Contract Delivery Deadline Dam Project
Engineer A cited the contractual delivery deadline as a contributing factor in his decision to deliver incomplete drawings and specifications without disclosure, treating the temporal constraint as a justification for non-compliance with professional obligations.
Engineer A faced a contractual delivery deadline for the dam design drawings and specifications that created time pressure, but this temporal constraint did not override or excuse the professional obligation to deliver complete work product or to disclose known incompleteness.
Contract terms between Engineer A's firm and the local public agency
The contractually specified delivery date for the dam design drawings and specifications
Engineer A Whistleblower Employment Jeopardy — Precedent Context
When engineer considers escalating beyond employer rejection of reports
if an engineer feels strongly that an employer's course of conduct is improper when related to public concerns, and if the engineer feels compelled to blow the whistle to expose facts as he sees them, he may well have to pay the price of loss of employment
Engineers generally who consider public disclosure of employer impropriety in non-safety contexts
Engineer's decision to disclose or not disclose
the ethical duty or right of the engineer becomes a matter of personal conscience
Employer rejection of engineer's concerns about improper conduct on public-interest grounds
Engineer A Written Report Completeness Dam Design Drawings
Engineer A delivered drawings and specifications from which much of the design detail was missing, without disclosing this incompleteness to the client, the federal approving engineer, or any other party.
Engineer A was constrained from delivering drawings and specifications with material design detail omissions without disclosing those omissions, as professional work product must include all information necessary for its intended purpose.
NSPE Code of Ethics — completeness and accuracy in professional work product
Throughout the design and delivery phase of the dam project
Engineer A responds to RFP before award of contract for design, drawings, and specifications
Engineer A's knowledge of incompleteness equals submission of incomplete drawings and specifications
Engineer A's non-disclosure of incompleteness starts submission through approval through bid award sequence
{'license': 'Professional Engineer', 'agency': 'Federal grant agency (implied)', 'violation': 'Failed to recognize own incompetence and escalate; approved deficient documents'}
Approved Engineer A's incomplete design plans despite lacking the technical competence to perform an adequate review, failed to recognize and disclose that competence gap to a supervisor, and thereby committed an ethical violation by proceeding with approval rather than escalating for reassignment.
{'type': 'reviewer_of', 'target': 'Engineer A Incomplete Deliverable Concealing Design Engineer'}
{'type': 'subordinate_to', 'target': 'Supervisor (unnamed)'}
Competence-Unrecognizing Plan Approval Engineer
Engineer B's approval of Engineer A's incomplete plans is troubling
If Engineer B was not able to perform the necessary reviews of Engineer A's work, Engineer B should have provided this information to a supervisor who would have assigned an appropriate engineer to perform the review
the failure to recognize the lack of competency and take appropriate action to address the situation is a violation of the NSPE Code
Engineer B Competence Limitation Recognition Supervisor Escalation Dam Review
Engineer B approved Engineer A's incomplete dam design plans; the Board found that if Engineer B lacked the competence to perform the review, the failure to recognize that limitation and escalate was itself a violation of the NSPE Code.
Competence Limitation Recognition and Supervisor Escalation Obligation
Engineer B, assigned to review and approve Engineer A's dam design documents, was obligated to recognize when that review assignment exceeded Engineer B's own technical competence and to immediately escalate to a supervisor so that a competent engineer could be assigned to perform the review, rather than proceeding with an inadequate review and approving incomplete documents.
At the time of reviewing and approving Engineer A's design documents
Engineer B's approval of Engineer A's incomplete plans is troubling, although we do not know all of the facts and circumstances relating to the decision to approve.
Engineer B Domain-Specific Competence Boundary Recognition Failure
Domain-Specific Competence Boundary Recognition Capability
Engineer B failed to recognize and articulate the boundary of his technical competence relative to dam design, and failed to correctly assess whether his competence was sufficient to conduct a substantive review of the specialized dam design documents submitted by Engineer A
Engineer B lacked or failed to apply the competence to recognize that dam design review required specialized technical knowledge he may not have possessed
Engineer B approved specialized dam design documents without the technical competence to detect material design deficiencies, failing to recognize that his competence boundary did not extend to adequate review of this specialized infrastructure type
Engineer B Federal Grant Agency Approval Engineer
{'license': 'Professional Engineer (implied by sealing authority)', 'employer': 'Federal funding agency', 'function': 'Design review and approval for grant-funded project'}
Staff engineer of the federal funding agency who reviewed, approved, signed, and sealed the dam design drawings and specifications submitted by Engineer A, enabling the project to be advertised for bids — without detecting the significant design deficiencies later identified by the contractor
{'type': 'approves_work_of', 'target': 'Engineer A Dam Design Engineer'}
{'type': 'authorizes_bid_for', 'target': 'Local Public Agency Client'}
{'type': 'represents', 'target': 'Federal Funding Agency'}
Federal Grant Agency Design Approval Engineer
the project is thereafter duly advertised for bids and a contract is awarded to the low bidder
Engineer B Federal Plan Approval Competence Boundary Dam Project
Engineer B, as the federal agency reviewing engineer, approved Engineer A's incomplete and partially unbuildable dam design drawings and specifications, either failing to detect the deficiencies through inadequate review or approving documents beyond his competence to evaluate.
Federal Plan Approval Competence Boundary Recognition Constraint
Engineer B was constrained from approving Engineer A's dam design drawings and specifications without conducting a substantively adequate technical review, and was required to recognize and act upon any competence boundary that prevented such a review.
NSPE Code of Ethics — competence; responsible charge; prohibition on approving work the engineer cannot adequately evaluate
At the time of federal plan review and approval of Engineer A's submitted drawings and specifications
Engineer B Federal Plan Approval Substantive Competence Review Dam
Engineer B approved, signed, and sealed Engineer A's incomplete dam design documents as a condition of federal grant funding without performing an adequate substantive review.
Federal Plan Approval Engineer Substantive Competence Review Obligation
Engineer B, as the federal funding agency's reviewing engineer, was obligated to conduct a substantive, technically adequate review of Engineer A's dam design documents sufficient to identify their material incompleteness before approving, signing, and sealing them, and was prohibited from approving documents through a perfunctory review that failed to detect material deficiencies.
At the time of reviewing, approving, signing, and sealing Engineer A's design documents for federal grant purposes
Engineer B Federal Plan Approval Substantive Competence Verification Dam
Federal Plan Approval Substantive Technical Competence Verification Capability
Engineer B, as the federal funding agency's reviewing engineer, should have possessed the capability to verify whether he had the technical competence to conduct a substantive review of Engineer A's dam design documents, and to recognize when he lacked that competence and seek qualified assistance before affixing his seal of approval.
Engineer B as federal funding agency staff engineer assigned to review and approve Engineer A's dam design drawings and specifications.
Failure to apply this capability: Engineer B approved Engineer A's incomplete plans, with the Board noting that 'we do not know all of the facts and circumstances relating to the decision to approve' but that Engineer B's approval was 'troubling.'
Engineer B Federal Plan Approval Substantive Review Dam Design
Engineer B, as staff engineer of the federal funding agency, reviewed, approved, signed, and sealed the dam design documents without detecting their material incompleteness, suggesting the review was insufficiently substantive.
Engineer B was obligated to conduct a substantive, technically adequate review of Engineer A's dam design drawings and specifications before approving, signing, and sealing them on behalf of the federal funding agency — a review sufficient to identify the material incompleteness and unbuildable elements that were later identified by the contractor.
At the time of reviewing and approving Engineer A's submitted drawings and specifications
Engineer B Federal Plan Approval Substantive Technical Competence Verification Failure
Engineer B failed to verify that he possessed the technical competence necessary to conduct a substantive review of Engineer A's dam design documents, and failed to recognize or disclose that his review was inadequate to detect the material incompleteness of the design
Engineer B, as the federal agency's reviewing engineer, approved incomplete dam design documents without conducting a substantive technical review adequate to detect the deficiencies
Engineer B approved, signed, and sealed Engineer A's incomplete dam design drawings and specifications without detecting or disclosing the material design deficiencies that were subsequently identified by the contractor at the pre-construction conference
Engineer B Responsible Charge Active Engagement Failure
Engineer B failed to maintain active, substantive engagement in the review of Engineer A's dam design documents constituting responsible charge before affixing his seal of approval, resulting in approval of materially incomplete design documents
Engineer B was obligated to conduct a detailed, substantive review constituting responsible charge before sealing Engineer A's dam design documents
Engineer B's approval of documents that were subsequently found to be materially incomplete and to contain unbuildable elements demonstrates that his review did not constitute genuine responsible charge engagement
Engineer B Responsible Charge Review Before Federal Approval Dam Project
Engineer B approved incomplete and partially unbuildable dam design documents submitted by Engineer A, suggesting that the federal review did not constitute a substantive responsible-charge-level evaluation of the work product.
Engineer B was constrained to conduct a substantive, technically adequate review constituting responsible charge before affixing federal approval to Engineer A's dam design drawings and specifications.
NSPE Code of Ethics; federal agency engineering review standards; professional licensing requirements for responsible charge
At the time of federal plan review and approval
Engineer B Responsible Charge Review Before Sealing Dam Approval
Engineer B signed and sealed approval of Engineer A's incomplete dam design documents without performing a review adequate to detect their material deficiencies, thereby certifying documents as professionally adequate when they were not.
Responsible Charge Detailed Review Before Sealing Obligation
Engineer B was obligated to conduct a detailed, substantive review of Engineer A's dam design documents constituting responsible charge before affixing his professional seal of approval, and was prohibited from sealing those documents based on a general or superficial review that failed to detect material incompleteness.
At the time of reviewing and sealing the dam design documents for federal approval
Engineer B Reviewing Engineer Competence Boundary Recognition Failure
From Engineer B's assignment to review Engineer A's plans through approval of incomplete plans
Reviewing Engineer Competence Boundary Recognition Failure State
Engineer B's approval of Engineer A's incomplete plans
Not possessing adequate competency to perform a task is not in and of itself a violation of the NSPE Code, but the failure to recognize the lack of competency and take appropriate action to address the situation is a violation of the NSPE Code
Engineer B assigned to review Engineer A's work product
Engineer Bid Evaluation Obligation Standard (Engineer C Diligence)
Professional Norm Governing Engineer-Contractor Bid Evaluation Diligence
Engineer Bid Evaluation Obligation Standard
Presumably, Engineer C had an opportunity to review the bidding documents which included appropriate engineering drawings, plans, and specifications.
Engineer C could have requested further clarification from the owner or Engineer A in order to better understand the engineering drawings.
Engineer C had no one to fault but himself for the problems Engineer C encountered in attempting to build the project.
Engineer C submitted the low bid on the project, presumably knowing inadequacies of the documents as well as the obvious risks involved.
If the engineering documents were incomplete or inadequate, then Engineer C's bid should have reflected that fact and contained appropriate bid items for additional services required to complete the work for the benefit of the owner.
NSPE Board of Ethical Review in evaluating Engineer C's conduct
Applied to Engineer C's failure to adequately evaluate incomplete bidding documents before submitting a low bid, establishing that an engineer-contractor must reflect known document deficiencies in the bid price, seek clarification, and accept responsibility for risks knowingly assumed.
Engineer B's approval before project advertised for bids
Engineer C Constructability Deficiency Pre-Bid Disclosure Dam Project
Engineer C, owner of Hi-Lo Construction and a licensed engineer, submitted the low bid on a dam project with design documents that — as an engineer — he should have recognized as materially incomplete or unbuildable, but raised these concerns only at the pre-construction conference after contract award.
Engineer-Contractor Constructability Deficiency Pre-Bid Disclosure Obligation
Engineer C, as both a licensed engineer and the low-bid contractor on the dam project, was obligated to disclose to the client the material constructability deficiencies and unbuildable elements he identified in the design documents prior to or at the time of bid submission, rather than waiting until the pre-construction conference to raise these concerns.
Prior to or at the time of bid submission; at minimum, immediately upon identifying constructability deficiencies during bid document review
Engineer C Contractor-Engineer Bid Submission on Deficient Documents
From Engineer C's review of bidding documents through submission of low bid
Engineer C's actions in bidding on an 'unbuildable' contract is also very troubling
Contractor-Engineer Bid Submission on Deficient Documents State
Engineer C's submission of low bid on unbuildable project with deficient engineering documents
Post-award discovery that project was unbuildable
Engineer C could have requested further clarification from the owner or Engineer A
Engineer C had no one to fault but himself for the problems Engineer C encountered in attempting to build the project
Engineer C submitted the low bid on the project, presumably knowing inadequacies of the documents as well as the obvious risks involved
Engineer C's bid should have reflected that fact and contained appropriate bid items for additional services required to complete the work for the benefit of the owner
Engineer C reviewing deficient bidding documents and submitting low bid without flagging deficiencies
Engineer C Dual-Role Document Evaluation Dam Project
Engineer-Contractor Dual-Role Document Evaluation Capability
Engineer C, as both a licensed engineer and a construction contractor, possessed the combined background and experience to carefully evaluate the engineering drawings and other aspects of the dam project work — including identifying design gaps and assessing constructability — before making an informed bid decision.
Engineer C as owner of Hi-Lo Construction reviewed dam project bid documents combining engineering and contractor expertise.
The Board's finding that Engineer C 'had the necessary background and experience to carefully evaluate the engineering drawings' and should have recognized the document inadequacies, implying this capability existed but was not properly exercised.
As an engineer and a contractor presumably, Engineer C had the necessary background and experience to carefully evaluate the engineering drawings as well as other aspects of the work in order to make an informed decision as to whether to bid on the project.
From such a review, Engineer C should have had a sense of what would be necessary to complete the project.
Engineer C Engineer-Contractor Constructability Deficiency Pre-Bid Disclosure
Engineer-Contractor Constructability Deficiency Pre-Bid Disclosure Capability
Engineer C, as both a licensed engineer and the owner of Hi-Lo Construction, possessed the capability to identify material constructability deficiencies in the dam design documents, though the case raises the question of whether this disclosure obligation should have been exercised before bid submission rather than only at the pre-construction conference
Engineer C, as owner of Hi-Lo Construction and a licensed engineer, identified constructability deficiencies at the pre-construction conference after having been awarded the contract as low bidder
Engineer C identified at the pre-construction conference that much design detail was lacking and that certain parts of the project were unbuildable without major changes, demonstrating technical capability to identify constructability deficiencies — though the timing of disclosure (post-award rather than pre-bid) raises ethical questions
Engineer C, owner of Hi-Lo Construction, that much of the design detail is lacking in the drawings and specifications and that Hi-Lo Construction declares that certain parts of the project are 'unbuildable' without major changes
Engineer C Hi-Lo Construction Contractor
{'title': 'Owner, Hi-Lo Construction', 'credential': "Engineer (implied by title 'Engineer C')", 'role_in_project': 'Low-bid construction contractor'}
Owner of Hi-Lo Construction (low-bid awardee) who at the pre-construction conference formally identified that design detail was lacking and declared portions of the project unbuildable without major changes, prompting Engineer A's admission of known incompleteness
{'type': 'confronts', 'target': 'Engineer A Dam Design Engineer'}
{'type': 'contracted_by', 'target': 'Local Public Agency Client'}
{'type': 'raises_concerns_to', 'target': 'Pre-Construction Conference Participants'}
Constructability Deficiency Identifying Contractor
Engineer C, owner of Hi-Lo Construction, that much of the design detail is lacking in the drawings and specifications
it is pointed out by Engineer C, owner of Hi-Lo Construction
Engineer C Pre-Bid Clarification Request Dam Project
Pre-Bid Clarification Request Capability
Engineer C should have possessed and exercised the capability to request further clarification from the owner or Engineer A regarding the incomplete engineering drawings before submitting his bid, in order to make an informed decision about the project scope and cost.
Pre-bid review phase of dam construction project; Engineer C reviewed bid documents containing incomplete design details.
Failure to apply this capability: Engineer C did not request clarification regarding the incomplete design documents before submitting his bid, proceeding instead with a low bid despite apparent document inadequacies.
In addition, Engineer C could have requested further clarification from the owner or Engineer A in order to better understand the engineering drawings.
Engineer C Pre-Bid Constructability Deficiency Disclosure Dam Project
Engineer C, as owner of Hi-Lo Construction and a licensed engineer, identified that much of the design detail was lacking and that certain parts of the project were unbuildable, but submitted a low bid and raised these issues only at the post-award pre-construction conference.
Engineer-Contractor Pre-Bid Constructability Deficiency Disclosure Constraint
Engineer C, as both a licensed engineer and the low-bid contractor on the dam project, was constrained to disclose to the client the material constructability deficiencies and unbuildable elements identified in the bidding documents before or at the time of bid submission, rather than raising them only at the pre-construction conference after contract award.
NSPE Code of Ethics — faithful agent duty; public safety paramount; prohibition on proceeding with known deficiencies without disclosure
During bid evaluation and before bid submission on the dam project
Engineer C Unbuildable Bid Deficiency Reflection Dam Project
Unbuildable Contract Bid Deficiency Reflection Capability
Engineer C should have possessed the capability to reflect the known constructability deficiencies of Engineer A's incomplete design documents in his bid price — including appropriate bid items for additional services — rather than submitting a low bid that ignored the inadequacies.
Engineer C as owner of Hi-Lo Construction submitted the low bid on the dam project after reviewing incomplete design documents.
Failure to apply this capability: Engineer C submitted the low bid on a project with knowingly inadequate documents without reflecting those deficiencies in the bid, then encountered construction problems attributable to the incomplete design.
Engineer C Unbuildable Contract Bid Deficiency Reflection Dam Project
Engineer C submitted the low bid on a dam construction project with design documents that, as an engineer, he should have recognized were incomplete or inadequate, without reflecting those deficiencies in his bid or seeking clarification.
Unbuildable Contract Bid Deficiency Reflection Obligation
Engineer C, as both a licensed engineer and the low-bid contractor on the dam project, was obligated to ensure that his bid reflected the material constructability deficiencies and design inadequacies he should have identified in the contract documents — by including appropriate bid items for additional services required to complete the work, or by requesting clarification from the owner or Engineer A — rather than submitting a low bid on documents he knew or should have known to be incomplete or unbuildable.
Finally, the Board believes that Engineer C's actions in bidding on an 'unbuildable' contract is also very troubling.
At the time of reviewing bidding documents and preparing and submitting the construction bid
{'license': 'Professional Engineer', 'dual_role': 'Engineer and construction contractor', 'violation': 'Bid on unbuildable contract without adequate pricing of deficiencies or seeking clarification'}
As an engineer and contractor, submitted the low bid on a project with knowingly incomplete or inadequate design documents without adequately reflecting deficiencies in bid pricing, seeking clarification, or declining to bid, and subsequently bore full responsibility for construction problems encountered.
{'type': 'peer', 'target': 'Engineer A Incomplete Deliverable Concealing Design Engineer'}
Unbuildable Contract Bidding Engineer-Contractor
As an engineer and a contractor presumably, Engineer C had the necessary background and experience to carefully evaluate the engineering drawings
Engineer C submitting low bid before Engineer C identifying design deficiencies at pre-construction conference
Engineer C's review of bidding documents before Engineer C submitting low bid
Engineer Pressure Resistance Obligation Violated by Engineer A
Dam design completion and delivery decision under schedule pressure
Faithful Agent Obligation Within Ethical Limits
Engineer A subordinated professional obligations to schedule pressure, delivering incomplete documents without disclosure — a paradigmatic failure of pressure resistance that the principle prohibits
The schedule pressure Engineer A experienced, however genuine, does not constitute an ethical justification for delivering incomplete professional work without disclosure; the engineer's professional obligations are not subordinated by deadline urgency
Engineer Pressure Resistance and Ethical Non-Subordination to Organizational Demands
he felt pressured to deliver the drawings and specifications on a specified date, but did not inform anyone as to their incompleteness.
Professional obligations are not subordinated to organizational or schedule pressures; Engineer A was required to resist the pressure and either complete the work, seek an extension, or disclose the incompleteness
Ethics Code Expansive Interpretation Canon Invoked in BER 82-5 Application
Scope of NSPE Code application to non-safety public welfare concerns
Public Funds Unjustified Expenditure as Ethics Code Cognizable Concern
The Board rejected a narrow reading of the NSPE Code that would limit its application to public health and safety dangers, applying instead an expansive interpretation that encompasses broader public welfare concerns including unjustified expenditure of public funds and unsatisfactory plans
Ethics codes should be read broadly to encompass the full range of professional responsibilities, not narrowly construed to exclude non-safety public welfare concerns
Ethics Code Expansive Interpretation Canon
Expansive interpretation prevails over narrow safety-only reading; the Board explicitly declined to dismiss on the narrow ground
Faithful Agent Notification Obligation Violated by Engineer A
Client notification obligation regarding incomplete dam design deliverable
Engineer A, as faithful agent of the local public agency, was obligated to notify the client that the delivered design documents were incomplete and that the project could not be built as specified — a notification that was never made, leaving the client to discover the problem only at the pre-construction conference
The faithful agent relationship required Engineer A to advise the client of the risk that incomplete documents posed to project success; silence in the face of known incompleteness is a fundamental breach of the faithful agent duty
Faithful Agent Notification Obligation for Project Success Risk
Faithful agent duty required notification; schedule pressure did not excuse the failure to notify
Federal grant program requirements and professional engineering ethics norms
Federal Grant Project Engineering Obligation Standard
a new dam to be financed in part by a federal grant
approved by Engineer B of the engineering staff of the federal agency funding the project
Engineer A; federal agency Engineer B; local public agency
Engineer A rationalized the submission of incomplete drawings by assuming federal grant funds would cover resulting cost overruns — this standard addresses the impermissibility of that reasoning and the heightened obligations on federally funded public projects
Federal Agency Approval of Deficient Documents
From Engineer B's approval through pre-construction conference
Engineer B's approval of Engineer A's incomplete drawings and specifications
Pre-construction conference revealing deficiencies
Engineer B signs and seals approval of drawings and specifications without awareness of their incompleteness
Federal Funding Agency Infrastructure Grant Authority
{'type': 'Federal government agency', 'function': 'Grant funding and design approval oversight', 'interest': 'Stewardship of federal infrastructure funds and public safety'}
Federal agency providing partial grant funding for the dam project, whose engineering staff (Engineer B) reviewed and approved the design documents, and whose funds Engineer A anticipated would absorb cost overruns from the incomplete design
{'type': 'approves_design_for', 'target': 'Local Public Agency Dam Project Client'}
{'type': 'employs', 'target': 'Engineer B Federal Grant Agency Approval Engineer'}
{'type': 'funds', 'target': 'Local Public Agency Dam Project Client'}
Engineer B of the engineering staff of the federal agency funding the project
Federal Grant Project Engineering Obligation Standard (Engineer A Completeness Duty)
NSPE Board of Ethical Review / professional engineering practice norms
Professional Obligation Standard for Federally Funded Engineering Projects
here, Engineer A was fully required to provide the complete design on the project.
NSPE Board of Ethical Review in evaluating Engineer A's incomplete plan submission
Applied to establish Engineer A's affirmative duty to deliver a complete set of design drawings and specifications on a publicly funded project, and to prohibit the assumption that federal funds would compensate for professional inadequacy.
Fraud and Misrepresentation Prohibition Invoked Against Engineer A Federal Funds Assertion
Engineer A's justification of incomplete dam design documents by reference to anticipated federal grant funds
Funding Source Non-Determinative of Ethical Obligation
Engineer A's assertion that federal funds would be awarded to complete the incomplete work was characterized by the Board as bordering on fraud and misrepresentation and a clear NSPE Code violation, because it used anticipated external funding as a shield against accountability for delivering incomplete professional work
Using anticipated supplemental funding as justification for delivering incomplete professional work constitutes misrepresentation because it deceives the client about the nature of what has been delivered and shifts professional responsibility onto an unintended funding mechanism
Fraud and Misrepresentation Prohibition in Professional Justification
The Board found no legitimate balancing — the funding justification was characterized as bordering on fraud with no mitigating factors
Funding Source Non-Determinative Invoked Against Engineer A Federal Funds Justification
Engineer A's incomplete dam design drawings justified by expectation of federal grant completion funds
Engineer A's expectation that federal funds would be awarded to complete the work was rejected as a justification for delivering incomplete design documents, establishing that anticipated supplemental funding does not modify the engineer's obligation to deliver complete professional work
The source of remediation funding — whether federal grants or local funds — is irrelevant to the engineer's duty to deliver competent and complete professional work; using funding expectations as justification borders on fraud and misrepresentation
Funding expectations cannot substitute for professional performance obligations; the engineer's duty to deliver complete work is independent of how any deficiencies might subsequently be funded
Funding Source Non-Determinative Rationalization by Engineer A
Decision to deliver incomplete dam design documents without disclosure
Engineer A rationalized delivering incomplete design documents by assuming federal funds would cover any resulting cost increases, treating funding-source assumptions as a substitute for professional completeness and disclosure obligations
Engineer A's assumption that federal funds would cover cost overruns does not diminish the obligation to deliver complete documents or disclose their incompleteness; financial coverage assumptions are irrelevant to the professional duty of completeness
The source of remediation funding is ethically irrelevant to the engineer's duty to deliver complete work; Engineer A's rationalization was ethically impermissible regardless of whether the assumption about federal funding was correct
Honesty in Professional Representations Invoked Against Engineer A Deceptive Acts
Engineer A's incomplete dam design documents and federal funds justification
Engineer A's delivery of incomplete design documents without disclosure, combined with the justification referencing federal funds, constituted deceptive acts in violation of the NSPE Code's affirmative responsibility to avoid deception
Unlike BER Case 82-5 which involved confidentiality conflicts, the current case concerns the affirmative responsibility to complete plans and avoid deceptive acts — honesty obligations are positive duties, not merely prohibitions on lying
No legitimate competing principle; the Board found Engineer A's conduct a clear violation
Honesty in Professional Representations Violated by Engineer A Sealed Incomplete Documents
Professional representation of completeness and adequacy of dam design documents
Engineer A's act of signing and sealing design documents he knew to be incomplete constituted a misrepresentation to the client, the federal agency, and the contracting community that the documents were professionally adequate and complete
The professional seal is a representation of adequacy; affixing it to known-incomplete documents is a form of professional dishonesty even absent explicit false statements
The signed and sealed drawings and specifications are ultimately approved by Engineer B of the engineering staff of the federal agency funding the project.
Honesty required either completing the documents before sealing or explicitly disclosing their incomplete status; the seal without disclosure was a misleading representation
Incomplete Disclosure to Supervisor Standard
While much of the information was missing from the drawings and specifications
Engineer A (obligation bearer who violated this standard)
Engineer A knowingly withheld information about the incompleteness of the drawings and specifications from the client agency, the federal approving engineer, and the contracting process — a paradigmatic case of incomplete disclosure of material deficiencies
Local Agency Client Technical Review Incapacity Resource Constraint Dam Project
The local public agency's lack of in-house technical resources meant it could not independently detect the material incompleteness and unbuildable elements in Engineer A's delivered drawings and specifications, amplifying the harm caused by Engineer A's non-disclosure.
The local public agency was constrained by its lack of in-house technical resources from independently reviewing and evaluating the completeness and adequacy of Engineer A's dam design drawings and specifications, making it entirely dependent on Engineer A's professional integrity and disclosure.
Factual circumstances of the case — small local public agency without engineering staff
Throughout the design review and approval phase of the dam project
Local Agency Technical Review Incapacity
Throughout the design, approval, and pre-construction phases of the project
The local public agency does not have the in-house technical resources to review the drawings and specifications
Client Technical Review Incapacity State
Local public agency's capacity to evaluate Engineer A's drawings and specifications
Not terminated within the case facts; persists through pre-construction conference
Local public agency's engagement of Engineer A without in-house technical review capability
{'type': 'Small local public agency', 'technical_capacity': 'None — no in-house engineering review staff', 'funding_source': 'Partial federal grant'}
Small local public agency that issued the RFP, awarded the design contract to Engineer A's firm, and lacked in-house technical resources to review the drawings and specifications — leaving it entirely dependent on Engineer A's professional integrity and Engineer B's federal approval for design adequacy assurance
{'type': 'awards_construction_contract_to', 'target': 'Engineer C Hi-Lo Construction Contractor'}
{'type': 'receives_federal_funding_from', 'target': 'Federal Funding Agency'}
{'type': 'retains', 'target': 'Engineer A Dam Design Engineer'}
Non-Engineer Public Infrastructure Client
Engineer A responds to an RFP from a small local public agency to build a new dam to be financed in part by a federal grant
Misrepresentation in Business Dealings Standard (Federal Funds Assertion)
National Society of Professional Engineers
NSPE Prohibition on Deceptive Acts and Misrepresentation
Misrepresentation in Business Dealings Standard
NSPE Board of Ethical Review in evaluating Engineer A's conduct
Applied to Engineer A's assertion that incomplete design work was excused by anticipated federal funding, which the Board characterized as bordering on fraud and misrepresentation and a clear Code violation.
Engineer A (obligation bearer); Engineer B (federal reviewer); ethical analysis
Primary normative authority governing Engineer A's obligation to deliver complete, accurate drawings and specifications, and to disclose known deficiencies to the client and approving agency
NSPE Code of Ethics (Engineer A Fraud and Misrepresentation)
the Board indicated that it could dismiss the case on the narrow ground that the NSPE Code does not apply to a claim not involving public health and safety
NSPE Board of Ethical Review in evaluating Engineer A and Engineer B conduct
Cited as the normative authority establishing that Engineer A's assertion that incomplete work was excused by anticipated federal funds constitutes a violation of the Code, specifically its prohibitions on deceptive acts and misrepresentation; also cited regarding Engineer B's competence obligations.
Post-Award Unbuildability Discovery at Pre-Construction Conference
Post-Award Unbuildability Discovery State
Hi-Lo Construction's identification of design deficiencies after contract award
Not resolved within the case facts; requires major design changes
Engineer C (Hi-Lo Construction owner) identifies missing design detail and declares portions of project unbuildable at pre-construction conference
Post-Award Unbuildability Discovery — Engineer C
From contract award through Engineer C's attempt to build the project
Engineer C's discovery after contract award that the project was unbuildable as designed
Resolution of construction problems through redesign or other means
Engineer C's post-award attempt to construct from deficient engineering documents
Proactive Risk Disclosure Obligation Violated by Engineer A
Known incompleteness and unbuildability risk in dam design documents
Engineer A identified that the design documents were incomplete and that certain parts of the project were unbuildable, but failed to proactively disclose this risk to the client, the federal approving agency, or the contractor prior to bid advertisement
Proactive risk disclosure required Engineer A to communicate the known incompleteness before the documents were approved, advertised for bid, and awarded — not to remain silent and allow the problem to surface at the pre-construction conference
much of the design detail is lacking in the drawings and specifications and that Hi-Lo Construction declares that certain parts of the project are 'unbuildable' without major changes.
The risk of project failure and public safety implications of an incomplete dam design required proactive disclosure; Engineer A's silence allowed the risk to propagate through the entire procurement chain
Professional engineering norms and NSPE Code
Engineer A's delivery of drawings and specifications acknowledged to be incomplete and partially 'unbuildable' raises questions about whether the work met minimum professional competence thresholds, and whether Engineer A should have disclosed limitations before or during the engagement
Professional Accountability Invoked Against Engineer A for Incomplete Deliverable
Consequences of delivering incomplete dam design documents without disclosure
Engineer A bears professional accountability for the downstream consequences of delivering incomplete dam design documents without disclosure — including the project's unbuildability, the need for major redesign, and the costs and delays imposed on the client, contractor, and public
Professional accountability requires that Engineer A accept responsibility for the professional judgment to deliver incomplete documents silently, regardless of the schedule pressure that motivated it
Schedule pressure does not transfer accountability to the client or the schedule-setter; Engineer A retains full professional accountability for the decision to deliver without disclosure
Professional Competence Invoked Against Engineer B Approval of Incomplete Plans
Engineer B's review and approval of Engineer A's incomplete dam design documents
Engineer B's approval of Engineer A's incomplete dam design plans without possessing the technical competence to perform an adequate review violated the professional competence obligation — engineers must perform services only within their area of competence
Professional competence requires not only technical ability but the self-awareness to recognize when one's competence is insufficient for a given task, and the professional integrity to act on that recognition
Professional competence and the escalation obligation are complementary; both point toward ensuring that only competent engineers perform technical reviews
Professional Competence Standard (Engineer B Review Obligation)
National Society of Professional Engineers / NSPE Board of Ethical Review
NSPE Professional Competence and Delegation Norm
NSPE Board of Ethical Review in evaluating Engineer B's approval of incomplete plans
Applied to Engineer B's obligation to recognize the limits of his own competence when reviewing Engineer A's incomplete plans, and to escalate to a supervisor or assign a competent reviewer rather than approve work he was not qualified to evaluate.
Professional Competence Violated by Engineer B Inadequate Technical Review
Technical review of dam design drawings and specifications for federal grant approval
Engineer B lacked or failed to apply the technical competence necessary to identify that the dam design documents were materially incomplete and unbuildable in significant portions, approving documents that a competent reviewer would have flagged
Professional competence in the review role required Engineer B to possess and apply sufficient technical knowledge to identify material design deficiencies; the failure to do so — whether from lack of competence or inadequate engagement — constitutes a professional competence violation
Engineer B was required either to possess the competence to conduct an adequate review or to decline the review assignment and refer it to a competent reviewer
Public procurement law and professional engineering norms
Local public agency; bidding contractors including Hi-Lo Construction
The project was publicly advertised for bids and a contract awarded to the low bidder based on incomplete drawings and specifications — raising fairness concerns about whether bidders had adequate information to price the work accurately
Public Dam Project Federal Funding Context
Throughout the project from RFP through construction
Federal grant funding conditions governing the dam project
Award of federal grant funding for dam construction project
Public Funds Unjustified Expenditure Ethics Code Cognizability Invoked in Current Case
Incomplete dam design drawings and specifications funded by public and federal grant funds
Whistleblowing as Personal Conscience Right Without Mandatory Duty Principle
The Board rejected a narrow reading of the NSPE Code that would limit its application to public health and safety dangers, affirming that unsatisfactory plans and unjustified public expenditure are cognizable ethical concerns even absent physical safety risk
The ethics code's scope extends to broader public welfare concerns including responsible stewardship of public resources, not merely physical safety
The Board affirmed code cognizability while maintaining the conscience-right rather than mandatory-duty framing for the whistleblowing dimension
Public Welfare Paramount Invoked by Engineer A Dam Design Failure
Dam design drawings and specifications for federally-funded public infrastructure project
Engineer A's delivery of knowingly incomplete dam design drawings and specifications without disclosure endangered the public who would rely on the dam's structural integrity, subordinating public welfare to schedule convenience
Public welfare paramount requires that engineers not deliver incomplete or unbuildable design documents for public infrastructure without explicit disclosure, regardless of schedule pressure or funding assumptions, because the public bears the ultimate risk of structural failure
Public welfare obligation overrides schedule compliance; Engineer A was required to either deliver complete documents, seek an extension, or explicitly disclose incompleteness — silence was not a permissible option
Was it ethical for Engineer A to submit final drawings and specifications for review and approval that he knew were incomplete?
Did Engineer A's submission of a signed and sealed set of incomplete drawings constitute fraud or misrepresentation toward the federal funding agency, and does the fact that he anticipated federal funds would absorb cost overruns aggravate rather than mitigate that ethical violation?
Given that the local public agency lacked the in-house technical capacity to evaluate the drawings and specifications, did Engineer A bear a heightened affirmative duty to disclose incompleteness precisely because his client was technically unsophisticated and wholly dependent on his professional judgment?
Was there an independent ethical obligation on Engineer A to formally notify the local public agency in writing that the drawings and specifications were incomplete before submitting them for federal review, and would such written notification have satisfied his professional obligations even if the agency chose to proceed anyway?
To what extent did the competitive bidding process itself suffer an ethical injury independent of the parties' individual violations — specifically, were contractors other than Hi-Lo Construction harmed by being asked to price a project whose true scope was unknowable from the deficient documents?
Was it ethical for Engineer B to approve a set of incomplete drawings on behalf of the Federal government for competitive bidding?
Does the Faithful Agent Notification Obligation — which required Engineer A to serve the local public agency's interests by delivering on the contracted schedule — conflict with the Public Welfare Paramount principle, which required him to withhold or qualify incomplete documents that could endanger public safety on a dam project?
Does the Responsible Charge Integrity principle — which demands that an engineer seal only complete and conforming documents — conflict with the Competence Boundary Recognition and Escalation Obligation imposed on Engineer B, in the sense that Engineer B's approval effectively ratified Engineer A's seal and may have created a false impression that a second competent professional had independently verified completeness?
Does the Engineer-Contractor Dual Role Constructability Disclosure Obligation imposed on Engineer C — requiring him to flag unbuildable conditions before bidding — conflict with the Whistleblowing Personal Conscience Right recognized in BER Case No. 82-5, which treats disclosure of non-safety deficiencies as discretionary rather than mandatory, and if so, which principle should govern when the deficiency involves public funds but not immediate physical danger?
Does the Honesty in Professional Representations principle — violated when Engineer A sealed incomplete documents — stand in tension with the Benevolent Motive Non-Cure principle, and does the Board's rejection of Engineer A's benevolent motive defense imply that good-faith assumptions about cost coverage can never substitute for transparent disclosure, even when the engineer genuinely believes no harm will result?
Was it ethical for Engineer C, owner of the Hi-Lo Construction firm, to submit a bid on a construction contract that he later characterized as “unbuildable” without major changes?
From a deontological perspective, did Engineer A fulfill his duty of honest professional representation when he signed and sealed drawings he knew to be incomplete, regardless of his belief that federal funds would cover any resulting cost overruns?
From a consequentialist perspective, did Engineer A's rationalization that federal funds would absorb any cost overruns adequately account for the full range of foreseeable harms — including procurement unfairness, public fund waste, project delay, and erosion of public trust in engineering — that his submission of incomplete documents would foreseeably cause?
From a virtue ethics perspective, did Engineer B demonstrate the professional integrity and intellectual honesty expected of an engineer in responsible charge when he approved drawings he either did not adequately review or lacked the domain-specific competence to evaluate, and did his failure to escalate reflect a deficiency in the virtues of diligence and professional courage?
From a deontological perspective, did Engineer C, in his dual role as both a licensed engineer and a contractor, have a categorical professional duty to disclose known constructability deficiencies to the public agency before submitting a bid, rather than submitting a bid and raising those deficiencies only after winning the contract at the pre-construction conference?
If Engineer A had formally notified the local public agency and the federal funding authority in writing of the known incompleteness of the drawings before the submission deadline — citing schedule pressure as the cause — would the ethical violations identified by the Board have been avoided, and would such disclosure have satisfied his obligations under the NSPE Code even if the incomplete documents were still submitted?
If Engineer A had refused to submit the drawings by the contractual deadline and instead requested a schedule extension to complete the design properly, how would this have affected the project timeline, the federal funding commitment, and the ethical standing of all three engineers — and does the NSPE Code support contract deadline refusal as a required response to incompleteness pressure?
If Engineer B had recognized the limits of his competence or the incompleteness of the submitted documents and escalated the review to a domain-qualified specialist or returned the drawings to Engineer A with a deficiency notice, would the project have proceeded to competitive bidding, and would Engineer C's ethical dilemma have arisen at all?
If Engineer C, upon identifying the constructability deficiencies during his pre-bid review, had formally notified the local public agency and requested a clarification or addendum before submitting his bid, would this have triggered a re-evaluation of the entire procurement — and would such action have discharged his ethical obligations as both an engineer and a contractor, even if it disadvantaged his firm competitively?
Raise Unbuildable Design at Pre-Construction
Raise Unbuildable Design at Pre-Construction (Action 6) → Admit Incompleteness Without Prior Disclosure (Action 7)
Rationalize Incompleteness via Federal Funds
Rationalize Incompleteness via Federal Funds (Action 3) → Deficient Documents Approved (Event 5)
Responsible Charge Engagement Violated by Engineer B Approval of Incomplete Documents
Federal agency review and approval of dam design drawings and specifications
Engineer B signed and sealed approval of Engineer A's incomplete dam design documents without substantive review adequate to detect their incompleteness, failing the active engagement requirement of responsible charge
Engineer B's approval signature and seal certified the documents as adequate for construction; the failure to detect material incompleteness — whether due to inadequate review or competence limitations — constitutes a failure of responsible charge engagement
Engineer B bore an independent professional obligation to conduct a substantive review; reliance on Engineer A's seal without adequate independent verification was insufficient
Responsible Charge Integrity Violated by Engineer A Seal on Incomplete Documents
Signing and sealing of incomplete dam design drawings and specifications
Engineer A signed and sealed design drawings and specifications that he knew to be incomplete, thereby certifying documents as professionally adequate when they were not — a fundamental violation of the responsible charge integrity principle
The professional seal certifies adequacy; affixing a seal to documents known to be incomplete misrepresents their professional status and undermines the entire certification system on which clients, regulators, and contractors rely
Responsible Charge Integrity and Seal Authority Principle
The signed and sealed drawings and specifications are ultimately approved by Engineer B of the engineering staff of the federal agency funding the project, and the project is thereafter duly advertised for bids and a contract is awarded to the low bidder, Hi-Lo Construction.
The seal's certifying function cannot be reconciled with known incompleteness; Engineer A was obligated to either complete the documents before sealing or explicitly note their incomplete status in the sealed submission
Schedule Pressure Non-Excuse Invoked Against Engineer A
Delivery of incomplete dam design drawings and specifications
Engineer A's invocation of schedule pressure as a defense for delivering incomplete dam design documents without disclosure is rejected by the principle that deadline pressure does not excuse the failure to disclose known incompleteness
The schedule pressure Engineer A faced was real but ethically irrelevant to the disclosure obligation; the appropriate response was to disclose the incompleteness, seek an extension, or withdraw — not to deliver silently
Schedule pressure does not override professional disclosure obligations; Engineer A's silence constituted an ethical violation regardless of the genuineness of the pressure experienced
Professional engineering norms and licensing board rules
Signed and Sealed Report Integrity Standard
Engineer A as the sealing engineer; Engineer B as the federal approving engineer
Engineer A signed and sealed drawings and specifications that were incomplete and deficient; the standard governs the professional obligations attached to that act of sealing, including the duty to ensure completeness and accuracy before sealing
Submit Incomplete Design Documents (Action 2) → Incomplete Documents Enter Review (Event 4)
Submit Low Bid on Inadequate Documents (Action 5) → Hi-Lo Wins Construction Contract (Event 7)
Technically Unsupported Client Heightened Disclosure Obligation Invoked for Local Public Agency
Local Public Agency Dam Project Client lacking technical review capacity
The local public agency, lacking in-house technical resources to independently review Engineer A's dam design documents, was particularly dependent on Engineer A's professional disclosure of any incompleteness — making Engineer A's failure to disclose especially harmful to the client's informed decision-making
The client's inability to independently detect deficiencies in the design documents heightened Engineer A's disclosure obligation; the client could not protect itself through independent review and therefore depended entirely on Engineer A's professional honesty
While the Board certainly hopes that the facts involved in this case are very unique and do not represent more than a small fraction of public design and construction projects in the United States, it appears that the facts as presented in this case are, unfortunately, not as unique as one might hope.
The heightened disclosure obligation reinforces rather than conflicts with the complete delivery obligation; both point toward Engineer A's duty to fully inform the client
Technically Unsupported Client Heightened Disclosure Obligation Violated by Engineer A
Delivery of incomplete dam design documents to technically unsupported local public agency client
The local public agency's lack of in-house technical resources to review the drawings and specifications heightened Engineer A's disclosure obligation regarding known incompleteness, making the failure to disclose particularly harmful because the client had no independent means of detecting the deficiency
Because the local agency could not independently detect the incompleteness of Engineer A's deliverables, Engineer A bore a correspondingly heightened obligation to proactively disclose what was missing — an obligation that was entirely unmet
The client's technical incapacity amplifies rather than diminishes the engineer's disclosure obligation; Engineer A's silence left the client entirely unable to make an informed decision about whether to accept the incomplete deliverable
Unbuildable Contract Bid Reflection Obligation Invoked Against Engineer C
Engineer C's low bid on dam project with incomplete design documents
Engineer C's bid on the dam project should have included appropriate bid items for additional services required to complete the incomplete design work, or alternatively Engineer C should have sought clarification from the owner or Engineer A before submitting — submitting a low bid without doing either, while knowing of the document inadequacies, was ethically problematic
The engineer-contractor's professional knowledge creates an obligation to account for known document deficiencies in the bid; submitting a low bid that ignores known inadequacies is inconsistent with professional honesty and faithful agent duties to the owner
Unbuildable Contract Bid Reflection Obligation
Competitive bidding pressure does not override the professional obligation to reflect known deficiencies in bid pricing or to seek clarification; the engineer's knowledge creates a duty that a lay contractor would not bear
Whistleblower Personal Conscience Framework (BER 82-5 derived)
NSPE BER Whistleblower Personal Conscience Doctrine
if an engineer feels strongly that an employer's course of conduct is improper when related to public concerns, and if the engineer feels compelled to blow the whistle to expose facts as he sees them, he may well have to pay the price of loss of employment.
the ethical duty or right of the engineer becomes a matter of personal conscience, but the Board was unwilling to make a blanket statement that there is an ethical duty in these kinds of situations for the engineer to continue the campaign within the company and make the issue one for public discussion.
NSPE Board of Ethical Review in framing the ethical right vs. duty analysis
Applied to distinguish between an ethical right and an ethical duty to blow the whistle when public funds are misused but public health and safety are not directly threatened; establishes that the engineer may face employment consequences for exercising this right.
Whistleblowing Personal Conscience Right Invoked in BER 82-5 Precedent Application
Engineer A's incomplete dam design documents
Unjustified expenditure of public funds on incomplete design
The Board applied BER Case No. 82-5 to establish that where the issue involves unsatisfactory plans and unjustified public expenditure rather than public health or safety danger, the engineer's ethical right to continue advocacy or blow the whistle is a matter of personal conscience, not mandatory professional duty
In this context, the absence of a direct public health or safety danger means the ethics code does not impose a blanket mandatory duty to continue internal campaigns or make the matter public, though the engineer retains the ethical right to do so
The Board declined to impose a mandatory whistleblowing duty but affirmed the ethical right, noting the engineer may have to accept employment consequences as the price of exercising that right
award of contract for design before production of drawings and specifications
contract awarded to Hi-Lo Construction before pre-construction conference
production of incomplete drawings and specifications before Engineer B's approval
project advertised for bids before contract awarded to Hi-Lo Construction
time pressure deadline before submission of incomplete drawings and specifications