What Will You Do When Your Desire to Please and Ethics Collide?

Several years ago I owned a small consulting engineering firm. Ours was a “full service” firm and a considerable amount of our work was with municipalities in the area of water supply and distribution.

I received a telephone call one day from a friend who lived in a neighboring state and worked for a much larger consulting engineering firm that practiced mainly in the areas of site development and the cleanup of contaminated sites and contaminated groundwater. He had called to ask if I was interested in assisting his employer in the design and construction oversight of a potable water filtration plant for a community in his area. I have considerable experience in the successful design of facilities such as this one and it seemed that my experience would be an asset to my friend’s firm.

A couple of weeks later our firm was introduced to the owner and our relationship with my friend’s firm and role as a member of the design team for the project were cleared. Contracts were finalized and work began.

Work progressed at a steady pace, and about twelve months later we had completed the design, obtained agency approvals, finalized all required funding, and received bids. Shortly thereafter the contract for construction was awarded and work began. The contract terms called for a twelve-month construction period that everyone agreed was demanding but achievable.

Six months after construction began the progress of the work was approximately three months behind schedule and slipping daily. At that time, a dispute arose between the contractor and the design team over the quality of certain structural materials being installed in the project. In our judgment the materials did not conform to the requirements defined in the specifications. The contractor claimed that the design team’s rejection of the materials was inappropriate, and further, that the plans and specifications contained critical errors, ambiguities, and oversights. After reviewing the contractor’s claims the design team advised the owner that it believed the design was sound, the details adequate, and the contractor to be using the dispute over these materials as a distraction to draw everyone’s attention away from the reality that he was seriously behind schedule on a project that had significant liquidated damages as a penalty for late delivery.

Since the materials in question were structurally critical, work slowed to a halt. Nine months after work in the field had begun, the contractor abandoned the site and began a flurry of legal activity that is so often encountered on occasions like this. The owner, concerned that the contractor’s claims regarding the quality and safety of the design may be valid, engaged the services of another engineering firm to perform what it called a “peer review’ of the plant design. Meanwhile the owner stopped all payments due the design team and, on the advice of its attorney, began legal proceedings against both the contractor and the design team.

In time the owner’s “reviewer” produced documents claiming that they had found serious flaws and deficiencies in the structural design and detailing of the plant which, if not corrected, would yield an unsuitable and possibly dangerous facility. This conclusion was drawn and published without a review of the design notes and calculations and without discussion with the design team regarding the designer’s intent with respect to the overall behavior of the structure or the supposed deficiencies. As seems typical in today’s litigious environment, the design team turned to yet another firm and asked that a thorough review of the design be undertaken. The first request made by this new firm was for a complete set of drawings and a complete copy of all design notes and calculations. After a review of these materials and lengthy discussions with the design team, this firm concluded that the design was neither unsafe nor flawed. This review did, admittedly, find errors in the project drawings. The errors found, however, did not render the building unsafe. Indeed, many of them had been found in the course of construction and their correction was already completed or underway.

I have provided this unhappy story in order to ask the question: Is it ethical to accept an assignment to review the design of another, and in the course of that review, take an approach that excludes the designer and ignores the available design notes and calculations? And, as is always the case in these essays, this is not intended to be a rhetorical question, nor do I ask it for the purpose of encouraging you to judge another, or me. I pose the question with the specific hope that you will ask it of yourself and that you will ponder your answer and decide whether or not it is compatible with your understanding of the ASCE Code of Ethics and whether or not you are comfortable with your answer.

The tenets that I have decided are best for me to follow have their roots in the third canon of the ASCE Code of Ethics, which says, “Engineers shall issue public statements only in an objective and truthful manner.” This means that whenever I am asked for my opinion, asked to investigate a structural failure, or asked to review the design of another, it is of paramount importance that I first, with intention, set aside my biases, my personal desire to please my client, and my self-interests. My focus must be on seeking the truth of the matter. If I cannot stand in front of the mirror in the morning, look at the person in front of me and say, from my heart, that I will do each of these today, to the best of my ability, then I am not fulfilling the guideline of the code. Which is neither good nor bad, unless I claim otherwise. For, in claiming to uphold the code while giving it no authority over my life, I perpetrate a fraud on myself, and worse, on others. This is wrong!

I believe the privilege of the technical training that I have received and the licenses that I have been granted carry with them special obligations. The training enables me to understand many things that most of those around me outside the profession do not understand. The license is meant to assure those that come to me that I am both knowledgeable and trustworthy. And, to me, to be trustworthy requires that my paramount objective is to gain an understanding of the available facts and then explain them in a way that others can understand.

When I have represented myself as a technical expert and I have then set out to understand the facts of an accident in order to explain them in a technically defensible fashion to support a predetermined position, I have committed a fraud. The license I have been granted requires that I seek the truth, which may not necessarily be the outcome my client desires! Additionally, I have failed to live up to the claim that the ASCE Code of Ethics holds authority over my professional practice.

Suppose a client (or potential client) asks me to gather data (possibly in the form of a traffic study) and, using the data, to prepare a report to be used in seeking agency approval for permitting a project. This client expects my report to claim the project will have no impact on the community. If I accept the commission and set out to “prove” that the project will have no impact on the community then I will have failed to set aside all of the “baggage” that will enable me to issue a technical report and explanation of the probable result of the project in an objective and truthful manner. The effect that a project will have on the community is not a technical issue and to claim otherwise is, in my view, inappropriate! When I produce a “technical report” that, in truth, is really a position paper designed to manipulate and persuade, I do not present the information in the manner the code requires.

I realize that this position, which I describe as mine, and mine alone, will be difficult for some to accept, possibly even offensive. But please remember that these are my views on the topic and I apply the requirements and judgments to only myself. Each must decide what the code requires and how to structure a life within that requirement. Or, some may simply choose not to honor its guidance at all! As I have said in the past, the only wrong answer here is one that is insincere; where one’s actions and one’s claimed beliefs are not in sync.

Now, I ask you the question: What will you do . . .

If you are a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers I again remind you that you have agreed to conduct your life within the guidelines of the Code of Ethics as follows:

It is neither my place nor anyone else’s to judge another because they choose not to give these tenets authority over their lives. However, to claim to hold them in authority while failing to review them often or acting as though they do not exist is wrong. My hope is that each person reading this essay will intentionally choose and then act consistently, without fraud, within the claimed choice.

—ASCE Business Practice Committee and Michael F. Garrett, P.E., M.ASCE. Michael Garrett has over thirty years’ experience in the design and construction fields. He has been the owner of an engineering and construction management practice in upstate New York since 1985, and is presently licensed to practice in several states. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].