(Written and posted 24 January 2009)

For those of you not from Oklahoma or not following the news, we have had a major scandal involving two public works engineers taking bribes and kickbacks from consultants and contractors to award them contracts and inflate the contract billings. As a registered professional engineer, let me unequivocally state that it saddens me when one of my fellow engineers abdicates his/her professional responsibility to improve the public welfare through graft, kickbacks, overreaching, greed, or plain indifference; it is a black mark against all of us. Let me also unequivocally state that it is a miniscule percentage of all professional engineers that are willing to abdicate their professional duties and obligations. Very few engineers that I have known throughout the more than two decades and six states that I have been an engineer have succumbed to the temptation to be dishonest and fraudulent, despite the ease of which that can happen. Herculean efforts have been made by professional organizations, state licensing boards, and businesses to minimize the potential for graft and fraud in the profession, but the nature of the profession makes it impossible to prevent all of the time. A dishonest engineer can goose the system quite easily if he or she has a mind to do so, and there is really nothing that can be done to prevent it.

It all starts with the nature of our services. We are professionals, like lawyers and doctors. Therefore, we are not hired based on our price, but rather our qualifications. If you need complicated heart surgery, would you trust the cheapest doctor you could find? Of course not; not if you want to maximize your chance of survival. For such a surgery, you will seek out the very best specialist you can find, cost notwithstanding. In other words, your selection is based on qualification, not price—you want the best qualified, not necessarily the cheapest. Government engineering services contracts are typically awarded on qualifications, not cost, as the government is seeking out the most qualified engineer to do the job. While this is how we want engineers to be hired (I want the very best structural engineer designing the bridges I am driving over), it is very easy to goose the system to steer engineering services contracts to a particular firm, as choosing the most qualified is very subjective. Suppose I have a panel of five people who have been given the task of selecting the best-qualified engineer. Each of those five people may think that a particular engineer is the best-qualified, and since it is subjective, how can anyone objectively say that they are wrong in their opinions? Let’s say that two of these five are on the take from a particular engineer. All those two would need to do is convince one of the other three that their choice is the best qualified, and then the deed is done. It’s as simple as that. What is incredible is that it doesn’t happen more often than it does. This speaks volumes about the integrity and honesty of professional engineers.

Now, when it gets to bidding the jobs, it gets a little harder to goose the system, but again it is much easier than what you think. We assume that contracts are always given to the lowest bidder, right? For the most part, that is correct. However, there is still a lot of opportunity for skimming the system. How? For starters, an inside guy can steer a friendly contractor into making the low bid. Let’s just say that I am a construction/contracts engineer, and I deal with the same eight or nine contractors regularly. After a period of time, I will be able to predict what a particular contractor will bid on a particular item or project based on historical trends. Using that information, I can coach a friendly contractor with whom I have a unsavory business deal on what to bid so that he will be the low bidder and awarded the contract. Once a friendly contractor has the contract then the corruption can kick into high gear through change orders, which are changes that allow additional work not in the original contract. Change orders are approved by the engineer, and add significant costs to the job, sometimes doubling or even tripling the original costs. An engineer that has been bought and paid for by a contractor can advise the contractor which specific items to charge excessive costs, and then approve change orders for extensive additions to those items. I remember as an engineering intern working on a project where the cost of pavement repair was ridiculously high, so high that on a particular bad piece of pavement, it would have cost more to repair it than to completely replace it. As the engineer I was working for was honest and ethical, he chose to completely replace; a dishonest one on the take would have chosen to repair it and then taken his cut of the difference. Sadly, unless there is someone who is looking over each and every item of the bid thoroughly, it would be practically impossible to detect the excessiveness.

Since, unfortunately, there are crooks out there, there are ways to make it more difficult. When selecting an engineer, some organizations will create a qualitative rating system taking into account such things as education, experience, etc. to provide a more objective way to evaluate and compare different firms. While not a perfect solution, such an objective system does goes a long way toward removing personal preference from the consultant selection process. When selecting a contractor, one big contract can be broken up into several little contracts. For example, I am working on a building rehab, and instead of hiring one contractor to do everything (i.e. roof, framing, electrical, plumbing), we are hiring contractors to do each individual task. The advantages are that we get more bids, better quality, and lower costs than if we had one contractor do everything. Of course, it requires a lot more oversight and coordination on our (the owners’) parts, but that is a small price to pay.

What is truly amazing to me is how little corruption there is despite the ease of being corrupt. Of the tens of thousands of licensed engineers out there, only a handful engage in conduct so fraudulent or bad that they lose their license. The typical engineer cares about his/her professional duty.

What keeps us honest? In my case, it’s knowing that my name is the most valuable thing that I have. If I tarnish my name, I also tarnish my family’s name. I don’t ever want my children to be embarrassed of their father. I don’t ever want my father (himself an engineer) to be embarrassed by his son. I don’t want my friends and other people I care about to be embarrassed to even know me. For the life of me, I can’t understand why anyone would trade his or her name for a few dollars. Dollars come and dollars go, but your name is with you forever, even when you have left this world.