Step 4: Review

Engineers shall issue public statements only in an objective and truthful manner.

Engineers shall be objective and truthful in professional reports, statements, or testimony. They shall include all relevant and pertinent information in such reports, statements, or testimony, which should bear the date indicating when it was current.

Engineers shall not offer, give, solicit, or receive, either directly or indirectly, any contribution to influence the award of a contract by public authority, or which may be reasonably construed by the public as having the effect or intent of influencing the awarding of a contract. They shall not offer any gift or other valuable consideration in order to secure work. They shall not pay a commission, percentage, or brokerage fee in order to secure work, except to a bona fide employee or bona fide established commercial or marketing agencies retained by them.

Cited to illustrate a prior instance where an engineer's report lacked integrity and completeness by omitting relevant information that would have changed the conclusions, paralleling Engineer A's incomplete analysis.

Cited as an analogous case where an engineer submitted incomplete work product without disclosing the incompleteness, supporting the finding that Engineer A's incomplete recommendation was similarly unethical.

It was unethical for Engineer A to leave out relevant and pertinent information from the analysis/ recommendation. Engineer A should have included evaluation of all available delivery methods rather than including only two, including one that A’s firm could provide. Engineer A could also have referred City Administrator to 3rd-party resources.

It was ethical for Engineer A to recommend progressive design build is the best choice, as long as reasons are objective, described, valid, and compared against all available and appropriate delivery methods. Unfortunately, Engineer A did not provide objective support for the recommendation. Consequently, Engineer A’s conduct was unethical.

It was not unethical to include marketing materials that display Engineer A’s firm’s qualifications.

The Board's finding that Engineer A improperly omitted delivery methods is amplified by the fact that City Administrator, as a non-engineer, lacked the technical background to independently recognize the omission or question why Construction-Manager-at-Risk and Fixed-Price-Design-Build were excluded. This asymmetry of expertise creates a heightened duty of disclosure that goes beyond simply providing objective information: Engineer A was effectively the sole gatekeeper of technical knowledge the City Administrator would rely upon, making the omission more consequential than it would be if the recipient were a fellow engineer capable of independently identifying gaps in the analysis.

Beyond the Board's conclusion that Engineer A's recommendation lacked objective support, a deeper structural issue exists: because Engineer A was only qualified to provide services under two of the four approved delivery methods, the very selection of which methods to analyze was already compromised before any reasoning was applied. This suggests the violation began not at the recommendation stage but earlier, at the scoping stage, when Engineer A implicitly limited the analysis to methods aligned with the firm's own service capabilities rather than the full universe of options available to City B under the funding source.

While the Board found no violation in Engineer A including marketing materials, this conclusion should be read narrowly: the compliance finding rests on the assumption that marketing materials are permissible only when attached to an otherwise complete and objective analysis. Had Engineer A provided a full comparison of all four delivery methods and still included firm credentials for Progressive-Design-Build, the marketing materials would remain unproblematic. However, when marketing materials are paired with an incomplete and self-serving analysis, they take on a different character, reinforcing the appearance that the entire memo functioned as a sales instrument rather than neutral professional advice, even though the marketing content itself was not separately unethical.

Because the City Administrator lacked engineering licensure and thus the technical background to independently assess the universe of delivery methods, Engineer A bore a heightened rather than diminished duty of disclosure. The Administrator's reliance on Engineer A's expertise increased the informational asymmetry between the parties, making the omission of Construction-Manager-at-Risk and Fixed-Price-Design-Build more consequential than it would be if the recipient were a technically sophisticated peer capable of independently identifying missing alternatives.

The combination of no existing contractual relationship between Engineer A and City B and the provision of the memo without charge supports an inference that the analysis functioned, at least in part, as a marketing overture rather than a purely disinterested professional opinion. This does not by itself make the free service unethical, but it heightens the need for the analysis to be scrupulously complete and objective, since the engineer stood to gain future paid work from the very recommendation being offered for free.

A fully transparent analysis would have required Engineer A to disclose the CMAR Engineer of Record entity-separation rule and explain how it affected the firm's own eligibility to serve in that capacity under a Construction-Manager-at-Risk delivery method. Failing to surface this constraint deprived the City Administrator of information relevant to understanding why Engineer A might have preferred Progressive-Design-Build, and thus compounded the incompleteness identified by the Board.

From a deontological standpoint, Engineer A had a duty grounded in the profession's public-trust obligations to present City B with a complete and objective account of all approved delivery methods, independent of whether doing so served the firm's commercial interests. By presenting only two of four options, Engineer A treated the City Administrator's decision-making process as a means to the firm's own business ends rather than as an end deserving full respect, which constitutes a failure of duty regardless of whether the ultimate recommendation happened to be sound.

A purely outcome-based justification for Engineer A's narrowed analysis is insufficient, because even if Progressive-Design-Build proved to be a workable or even optimal choice for City B, the process by which that recommendation was reached lacked the objectivity and completeness the Code requires. Ethical evaluation of professional conduct in this context focuses on the integrity of the decision-making process presented to the client, not merely whether the resulting recommendation happens to serve the client's interests.

Engineer A's selection of the one delivery method for which the firm was uniquely positioned to provide services, out of only two methods presented, reflects a lack of professional integrity because it substituted self-interested convenience for a disinterested comparison. Professional integrity in advisory contexts requires that an engineer's own capacity to profit from a recommendation not shape which alternatives are surfaced for the client's consideration.

From a virtue-ethics perspective, attaching truthful firm credentials and project references to an admittedly incomplete delivery-method analysis reflects a subtle lack of candor, even though the Board found the marketing materials themselves unobjectionable. The vice lies not in the marketing content but in pairing persuasive self-promotion with an analysis that omitted competing options, creating an overall impression of even-handedness that the memo did not actually possess.

Had Engineer A already held a contractual relationship with City B for construction services at the time the recommendation was made, the Board would likely have viewed the self-interest concern as even more pronounced rather than less, since an existing financial relationship would have made the incentive to steer the City toward Progressive-Design-Build more direct and immediate. The absence of a prior contract in the actual case somewhat mitigates, but does not eliminate, the appearance of self-interested advocacy.

If Engineer A had been qualified under only Progressive-Design-Build and not also Construction-Manager-at-Risk, the objectivity concern would likely have been even more acute, since the recommended method would have aligned exactly and exclusively with the engineer's own business capabilities, removing any ambiguity that the choice among presented options might have been driven by considerations other than self-interest.

Had Engineer A's memo evaluated all four approved delivery methods, including Construction-Manager-at-Risk and Fixed-Price-Design-Build, while still ultimately recommending Progressive-Design-Build, the Board likely would not have found an ethics violation on the completeness ground, since the core problem identified was the omission of viable alternatives rather than the ultimate recommendation itself. A transparent comparison that disclosed why the other methods were less suitable, even while recommending a method within Engineer A's own competence, would satisfy the Code's objectivity and completeness requirements.

The case demonstrates that Complete Reporting and Objectivity are not truly competing principles but are mutually constitutive: Engineer A's failure of objectivity (recommending Progressive-Design-Build without valid comparative reasoning) was a direct consequence of the failure of complete reporting (omitting Construction-Manager-at-Risk and Fixed-Price-Design-Build). The Board treated these as two facets of a single underlying duty—full and honest professional analysis—rather than as independent obligations to be balanced against each other. This suggests that where an engineer's professional judgment is not grounded in a complete survey of relevant options, objectivity is definitionally impossible, not merely difficult.

The tension between Complete Reporting and Engagement Solicitation in Free Services was resolved in favor of Complete Reporting: the Board's finding that marketing materials alone were not unethical, combined with its finding that the selective omission was unethical, shows that solicitation of future business is permissible so long as it does not distort the substantive content of a professional recommendation. The marketing principle is thus subordinated to, and bounded by, the disclosure principle—an engineer may market their firm's qualifications, but may not let the desire to secure future engagement narrow or bias the analysis presented as if it were disinterested advice.

The case illustrates that an engineer's Advisory Competence (i.e., which delivery methods the firm is qualified to perform) cannot be allowed to silently define the scope of a supposedly comprehensive analysis. Objectivity of Delivery Method Recommendation required Engineer A to either analyze all four approved methods regardless of personal capability, or to explicitly disclose the boundary of their own competence and its potential to bias the recommendation. Because Engineer A did neither, the principle of Objectivity was subordinated to an unstated structural conflict of interest rooted in capability, showing that omission of capability-based limitations is itself a violation of professional candor even without overt self-dealing.

Was it ethical for Engineer A to provide a recommendation on project delivery methods that only included two of the possible methods, without providing the complete analysis and the reasoning behind recommending the two selected methods over others?

Was it ethical for Engineer A to recommend the method for which they could provide services?

Was it ethical for Engineer A to include project summaries and references to encourage selection of their firm for the recommended method for project delivery?

Because the City Administrator is not a licensed engineer and could not independently evaluate the omission of delivery methods, did Engineer A have a heightened duty to disclose the full range of options and the reasoning behind excluding two of them?

Does the absence of a contractual relationship between Engineer A and City B, combined with Engineer A providing this advisory memo for free, suggest the memo functioned as a marketing tool to solicit future paid work rather than a neutral professional analysis?

Should Engineer A have explicitly disclosed to City B that they were only qualified to provide services under two of the four delivery methods, so the City Administrator could assess potential bias in the recommendation?

Given that the funding agency requires the CMAR firm and Engineer of Record to be distinct entities, should Engineer A have disclosed how this rule would affect their own eligibility to serve as EOR under a CMAR delivery method, as part of a fully transparent analysis?

How should Complete Reporting in Delivery Options Memo be balanced against Engagement Solicitation in Free Services, given that Engineer A provided free advisory services partly to position the firm for future paid work?

How should Objectivity of Delivery Method Recommendation be balanced against the fact that Engineer A's firm was only capable of providing services under one of the two methods presented, creating an incentive to favor that method?

Does Complete Reporting in Delivery Method Advice conflict with Objectivity in Delivery Method Advice when an engineer omits methods outside their own competence, even if the reasoning for the methods actually presented is sound?

From a deontological perspective, did Engineer A fulfill the duty of complete and objective reporting owed to City B when presenting only two of four approved delivery methods?

Did the outcome of City B receiving a workable recommendation justify Engineer A's decision to narrow the analysis to the two methods most favorable to their own firm's involvement?

Did Engineer A act with professional integrity when recommending the one delivery method (Progressive-Design-Build) for which their own firm could provide services, rather than presenting a disinterested comparison of all four options?

From a virtue-ethics standpoint, does attaching firm credentials and past-project references to an incomplete delivery-method analysis reflect a lack of candor even if each individual marketing claim is truthful?

If Engineer A had already held a contractual relationship with City B for construction services at the time of the recommendation, would the Board still have characterized the recommendation of Progressive-Design-Build as improperly self-interested?

If Engineer A had been qualified to provide services under only Progressive-Design-Build and not also Construction-Manager-at-Risk, would the Board's finding that the recommendation lacked objectivity still apply with the same force?

If Engineer A's summary memo had included evaluation of all four approved delivery methods (including Construction-Management-at-Risk and Fixed-Price-Design-Build) while still ultimately recommending Progressive-Design-Build, would the Board have found the omission of relevant information unethical?

As the initiating action with no normative edges, Recommendation Solicitation is ethically neutral in itself, but it sets the causal chain in motion by prompting Engineer A's subsequent free evaluation, which is where the ethical problems actually originate.

Providing a free engineering evaluation violates the prohibition on offering valuable consideration to secure work, and this matters because it directly causes the Free Services Extension, which later feeds into the Unethical Conduct Finding, showing how an improper inducement escalates into a broader ethics violation.

Selective Method Presentation violates the duties to include all relevant information and to be objective and truthful, and this is significant because it directly causes Incomplete Information Delivery, which downstream leads to the Unethical Conduct Finding, illustrating how curated presentation undermines the client's ability to make an informed decision.

The Delivery Method Recommendation violates the objectivity and truthfulness obligation because it too feeds into Incomplete Information Delivery, compounding the effect of the selective presentation and jointly driving the finding of unethical conduct.

Attaching firm credentials alongside the free evaluation violates the rule against offering valuable consideration to secure work, reinforcing that the free service was not an isolated act but part of a package designed to influence the city's selection, which ties back into the same causal path toward unethical conduct.

The question arises because Engineer A's advisory role obligates full transparency to enable informed client decisions, yet the technical nature of delivery method selection also permits professional narrowing of options, creating ambiguity about whether limiting the analysis was a service to the client or a self-serving omission.

The question arises because Engineer A's memo recommended a delivery method for which the firm could later provide services, creating a conflict between the duty to give complete, objective advice and the appearance of self serving guidance, as seen in the parallel BER precedents on incomplete and self serving information.

The question arises because Engineer A combined a technical recommendation with self-promotional firm credentials in a free, unsolicited submission, blurring the line between objective engineering advice and solicitation of work, which is exactly the tension addressed in BER precedents like Case 95-5 and 99-8.

The question arises because Non Engineer Administrator Reliance combined with Omitted Delivery Options Memo creates ambiguity over whether ordinary professional disclosure norms suffice or whether the client's lack of technical capacity elevates Engineer A's obligation.

The question arises because the absence of a contract combined with free provision of services creates ambiguity about Engineer A's motive, forcing a choice between treating the memo as neutral technical advice or as a self-interested marketing document, a tension the entities' incomplete disclosure and firm credentials attachment do not resolve on their own.

The question emerges because Engineer A's Omitted Delivery Options Memo created a Self Interested Delivery Recommendation situation where a non-expert client relied on incomplete information, raising doubt about whether silence on qualification limits was a passive omission or an active ethical failure.

The question arose because Engineer A's Summary Memo recommended delivery methods without addressing how the CMAR Engineer of Record Entity Separation constraint would personally exclude or include Engineer A, leaving open whether omitting this self relevant fact constitutes a breach of complete reporting even if the technical content was accurate.

The question arises because Free Services Extension and Omitted Delivery Options Memo create a factual overlap between generous professional assistance and self-serving business development, and the BER must weigh Complete Reporting in Delivery Options Memo against Engagement Solicitation in Free Services without clear evidence of Engineer A's true intent.

The question arises because Engineer A's structural conflict of interest, being capable of only one delivery method, creates ambiguity about whether a recommendation favoring that method reflects a compromised warrant of self-interest or a legitimate warrant of professional competence disclosed transparently.

The question arises because Engineer A's Advisory Competence is narrower than the full range of possible delivery methods, so acting objectively within that competence produces a report that appears incomplete relative to the full universe of options the City Administrator needed to consider.

The question arises because the same memo can be read either as a narrow response to a specific request or as a comprehensive professional recommendation, and deontological duty language does not specify which framing governs Engineer A's obligation to City B.

The question arises because the case invites evaluating engineering ethics by result (a workable outcome) versus by process (objective, complete analysis), and Toulmin's model exposes that a good outcome does not automatically satisfy the warrant of professional objectivity that the Code requires independent of results.

The question arises because Engineer A's free, solicited memo recommended only the delivery method their firm could staff, creating a structural conflict between serving the client's need for unbiased advice and the firm's interest in securing future work, mirroring precedent in BER Cases 95-5 and 99-8.

The question arises because virtue ethics evaluates character and honesty holistically rather than claim-by-claim, so a technically truthful but selectively framed presentation can still raise concerns about candor that a strict factual-accuracy standard would not capture.

The question arose because the BER's finding of self-interest could plausibly rest on two different warrants, one tied to soliciting new work through free services and one tied to a standalone objectivity and disclosure duty, and altering the factual premise of an existing contract tests which warrant actually drove the ethical conclusion.

The question arises because the BER's finding conflated two distinct grounds, a general objectivity/completeness obligation and a narrower self-interest inference from dual qualification, so removing one qualification tests whether the finding was truly categorical or contingent on that specific conflict.

The question arises because the actual case involved both incomplete information and a specific recommendation, so it is unclear whether the Board's finding of unethical conduct rested on the missing options themselves or on the appearance of bias in favoring one method, and hypothetically adding full disclosure isolates which warrant was doing the real ethical work.

Given that Engineer A presented only two of the four available delivery methods and offered no reasoned justification or alternative resource for the missing options, the board concluded this selective presentation withheld pertinent information and was therefore unethical.

Because Engineer A recommended the delivery method aligned with its own capabilities without supplying objective comparative support, the board found the recommendation was not shown to be free of self-interest and therefore unethical.

Since the project summaries and references were truthful and did not themselves corrupt the technical content of the memo, the board concluded their inclusion was permissible even though the underlying recommendation was otherwise flawed.

Because the City Administrator lacked engineering expertise and depended entirely on Engineer A as the technical gatekeeper, the board reasoned that the same omission carried heightened ethical weight than it would have if directed at a technically equipped peer.

Given that Engineer A could only perform services under two of the four approved methods and the CMAR entity-separation rule further narrowed eligible options, the board reasoned that the bias was embedded in the scoping decision itself, before any comparative reasoning was even applied.

Because the memo omitted two of four methods, the Board read the otherwise-permissible inclusion of marketing materials as reinforcing the appearance that the whole memo was a sales instrument, even though it found no independent violation in the marketing content itself.

Given that the Administrator relied entirely on Engineer A's expertise and could not check the completeness of the options presented, the Board concluded the omission of two delivery methods was more consequential than it would be for a technically equipped recipient, and thus heightened the disclosure duty.

Because Engineer A had no existing contract with City B and gave the memo for free, the Board inferred a marketing dimension to the engagement, which did not make the free service itself unethical but did heighten the need for the underlying analysis to be complete and objective.

Because the entity-separation rule directly affected Engineer A's own capacity to serve under CMAR, the Board concluded a fully transparent analysis required surfacing that rule so the Administrator could understand the possible motive behind favoring Progressive-Design-Build.

Because Engineer A presented only two of four methods in a way that served the firm's own business ends, the Board found a deontological failure of duty to the City Administrator that exists regardless of whether the resulting recommendation was practically sound.

Given that Engineer A presented only two of four approved methods to a non-engineer administrator who could not detect the gap, the Board reasoned that even a fortunate or workable outcome for City B could not cure the deficiency in the underlying decision-making process, because ethical evaluation targets the completeness and objectivity of what was presented, not merely whether it happened to work out.

Because Progressive-Design-Build was the only delivery method among the two presented that left Engineer A's firm eligible for future construction-related work, the Board concluded that the recommendation reflected self-interested convenience rather than a disinterested professional comparison.

Since Engineer A's credentials and references were factually accurate but attached to a memo that omitted two of four approved delivery methods, the Board reasoned that the pairing created a false impression of even-handed analysis, revealing a subtle lack of candor even without any false statement.

Because no contract in fact existed between Engineer A and City B at the time of the recommendation, the Board treated the self-interest concern as somewhat mitigated, while reasoning that had such a contract existed, the incentive to steer City B toward Progressive-Design-Build would have been more immediate and the ethical concern correspondingly graver.

Since Engineer A actually held qualifications under both presented methods, the Board found some residual ambiguity that tempered the self-interest concern, but reasoned that if the firm's qualification had been exclusive to Progressive-Design-Build, the alignment between recommendation and business capability would have been complete and the objectivity violation more acute.

Given that the actual memo omitted two of four approved methods, the Board reasoned counterfactually that had Engineer A instead surveyed all four options and disclosed valid reasons for preferring Progressive-Design-Build, no completeness violation would have been found, since the deficiency lay in the missing comparison rather than in the outcome favoring the engineer's own competence.

Because Engineer A's recommendation lacked any comparative grounding across the full set of approved methods, the Board concluded that the objectivity defect was simply the downstream expression of the completeness defect, treating the two as a single duty of full and honest analysis rather than as competing principles to weigh.

Because Engineer A's marketing materials (project summaries and references) were found unobjectionable on their own, but the omission of two delivery methods was found unethical, the Board concluded that solicitation of future business is permissible only when it does not bias or truncate the professional analysis, effectively bounding the marketing principle by the disclosure principle.

Given that Engineer A's qualifications extended to only one or two of the four approved methods and this fact was never disclosed to City B, the Board concluded that the recommendation's objectivity was compromised by an unstated capability-based conflict of interest, since neither a full analysis nor an explicit disclosure of the competence boundary was provided.

Should Engineer A have analyzed and disclosed all four approved delivery methods (or referred City B to third-party resources) instead of presenting only two selected methods?

Should Engineer A's recommendation of Progressive Design-Build have been grounded in objective, documented comparison against all appropriate delivery methods, independent of which method the firm itself could service?

Should Engineer A have included firm credentials and project references in the delivery-method memo to encourage selection of its own firm?

Should Engineer A have provided the delivery-method evaluation free of charge without ensuring it was fully complete and objective, given the risk that the free service could function as a marketing overture for future paid work?