Ethical Responsibilities Of Consulting Engineers

CONSULTING ENGINEERS

The consulting engineers work in private. There is no salary from the employers. But they charge fees from the sponsor and they have more freedom to decide on their projects. Still they have no absolute freedom, because they need to earn for their living. The consulting engineers have ethical responsibilities different from the salaried engineers, as follows:

1. Advertising
The consulting engineers are directly responsible for advertising their services, even if they employ other consultants to assist them. But in many organizations, this responsibility is with the advertising executives and the personnel department.

They are allowed to advertise but to avoid deceptive ones. Deceptive advertising such as the following

2. Competitive Bidding

It means offering a price, and get something in return for the service offered. The organizations have a pool of engineers. The expertise can be shared and the bidding is made more realistic. But the individual consultants have to develop creative designs and build their reputation steadily and carefully, over a period of time. The clients will have to choose between the reputed organizations and proven qualifications of the company and the expertise of the consultants. Although competent, the younger consultants are thus slightly at a disadvantage.

3. Contingency Fee

This is the fee or commission paid to the consultant, when one is successful in saving the expenses for the client. A sense of honesty and fairness is required in fixing this fee. The NSPE Code III 6 (a) says that the engineers shall not propose or accept a commission on a contingent basis where their judgment may be compromised.
The fee may be either as an agreed amount or a fixed percentage of the savings realized. But in the contingency fee-agreements, the judgment of the consultant may be biased. The consultant may be tempted to specify inferior materials or design methods to cut the construction cost. This fee may motivate the consultants to effect saving in the costs to the clients, through reasonably moral and technological

Objectivity
The engineers should study the cost and benefits of all possible alternative means in objective manner, within the specified conditions and assumptions.

2. Study All Aspects
They have to study the economic viability (effectiveness), technical feasibility (efficiency), operational feasibility (skills) and social acceptability, which include environmental and ethical aspects, before formulating the policy.

3. Values
Engineers have to posses the qualities, such as (a) honesty, (b) competence (skills and expertise),
(c) Diligence (careful and alert) (d) loyalty in serving the interests of the clients and maintaining Confidentiality, and (e) public trust, and respect for the common good, rather than serving only the interests of the clients or the political interests.

4. Technical Complexity
The arbitrary, unrealistic, and controversial assumptions made during the future planning that are overlooked or not verified, will lead to moral complexity. The study on future is full of uncertainties than the investigations on the past events. On the study of energy options, for example, assumptions on population increase, life style, urbanization, availability of local fossil resources, projected costs of generating alternative forms of energy, world political scenario, world military tensions and pressures from world organizations such as World Trade Organization (W.T.O.) and European Union (EU) may