I love the American Society of Civil Engineers' journals, especially the ones concerned with management and leadership. Although some of the articles are limited academic explorations, some contain fresh ideas.

One recent article intrigued me just because of what I read in its abstract. In a July issue of Leadership and Management in Engineering, engineer Coy M. Veach asked why his fellow professionals focus with such zeal on engineering ethics with all its Talmudic intricacy. “Ethics are ethics,” he writes. “Have we, by creating a set of ethics for our professional lives as engineers, made the concept of ethical behavior so complex and confusing that we fail to act in ways consistent with moral principles when faced with an ethical dilemma?”

To get a feeling for how complex and confusing it can get out there, I took an electronic stroll through some disciplinary actions against engineers described on the website of the California Department of Consumer Affairs. California is a big state, and it didn't disappoint me.

In 2003, California suspended for 90 days the license of Keith Douglas Masuda, saying he contracted to provide a land survey, set some monuments and collected his entire fee for the job without ever properly marking the monuments or filing the survey. The property owner complained and, by the way, at the time Masuda was not licensed as a land surveyor, the state says. So California ordered him to take classes in surveying and engineering practice and to pay almost $8,000 for the cost of the investigation.

Pretty bad violations, but pretty stiff punishment, I would say. Originally the board revoked Masuda's license, but the revocation was stayed.

The same thing happened to Earl McGuire in 1999; his license was revoked and the revocation was stayed and probation was handed out instead. One of McGuire's alleged offenses, according to the state, was falsely representing to employees of Earl McGuire Consulting that they would participate in a health and insurance plan "and taking payroll deductions from his employees for health and supplemental insurance coverage even after the coverage was canceled." Financial engineering you would call that, I suppose.

These stories sent me into a sinkhole of depression because so much honest work and so many honorable decisions are made every day by design professionals. There aren't statistics, as far as I know, showing the tenacity with which engineering ethics are enforced. Consider that about 125,000 complaints are lodged against attorneys each year but disciplinary proceedings are only begun against 2,500 or so. There's a profession that needs cleaning up.

Nevertheless, I'll give you one more example from California.

Three times between 2000 and 2005 civil engineer Dinh H. Nguyen petitioned the state and the engineering board to reinstate his license. It had been revoked in 1999 for a dangerously incompetent soil evaluation for a planned movie theater and some commercial buildings and a parking lot. According to the state, Nguyen's investigation indicated the subsurface condition along the western perimeter of the site had four different soil stratums, when the site actually contained artificial fill and Mehrten Formation. Nguyen failed to detect the bedrock and artificial fill by the five borings in his report. His investigation stated that he drilled 15 feet along the western perimeter. It is questionable whether Nguyen could achieve a depth of 15 feet due to the hard bedrock condition, the state says. He inaccurately stated in his investigation that the site was underlain by young alluvium or floodplain deposits. Additionally, he failed to provide or include design criteria for lateral resistance in his foundation; failed to present the numerical moisture contents he allegedly obtained from the borings, a failure beneath the standard of care; he failed to indicate the numerical blow counts on the boring logs; and he failed to clearly approximate the lithology changes on the logs or show where the samples were taken. 

Here the board seemed to be restraining its wrathful judgment, because it also noted that Nguyen's investigation did not recommend a capillary moisture break under the slabs and that he improperly recommended wetting the silty sand soil during grading to three percent over the optimum. He improperly ran a sieve analysis on a sample from zero to ten feet and failed to state which boring the sample was taken from. Finally, he failed to perform strength tests or obtain blow counts, without which his determination of bearing capacity cannot be substantiated, the state claims.

California's board also found that Nguyen's testimony displayed a lack of knowledge of basic engineering, an inability to correctly interpret data and a lack of familiarity with the use of reference materials. Further, it found "that while some lack of education and skill might be resolved by supervised practice and/or remedial education, no probationary terms could correct the dishonesty and misrepresentations which he apparently believed to be his prerogative because he had an engineering license."

Effective March 18, 1999, Nguyen's license was revoked and he was ordered to pay $5,581.20 to the board for the investigation costs. The state also ordered him to pay $2,400 of the costs of an interpreter used during the hearings.

Something must have been lost in the interpretation of the word license. Perhaps now Nguyen understands the word's meaning in the context of a profession. But no ethical tutoring, engineering or otherwise, can restrain a professional sociopath in any field.

Between the time of his work on the theater project and the final action against him, Nguyen had fortunately found new employment, according to the state.

At the California Department of Transportation.

The Department of Consumer affairs sent it a report on the investigation.

September 15, 2006

How funny that some people think having a written code of ethics has any impact...

Frannie Rutherford
New York City