Step 4: Full View

The narrow wording of the employment application question does not meaningfully redistribute moral responsibility for Engineer F's omission to the hiring firm. While the engineering firm could have drafted a more comprehensive disciplinary inquiry question, the ethical obligation to disclose material integrity information flows from Engineer F's own duties under the NSPE Code - not from the precision of the questioner's drafting. An engineer who exploits an imprecisely worded question to omit an adjudicated integrity violation is not acting as a faithful agent or trustee; he is engaging in legalistic self-protection that the Code explicitly prohibits. The firm's imperfect drafting may reflect a due diligence gap on its part, but it does not constitute a moral license for Engineer F to withhold information that any reasonable employer would consider material to a hiring decision. The ethical obligation to avoid deceptive acts and technically misleading statements is self-executing - it does not depend on the sophistication of the question posed.

The Allegation-Adjudication Distinction - used to differentiate Engineer F's case from BER Case 97-11, where Engineer A faced only a pending ethics complaint - resolves a latent tension between the Prudential Disclosure principle and the Omission Materiality principle by establishing a graduated disclosure threshold rather than a binary rule. Under BER 97-11, the Board declined to impose a categorical obligation on Engineer A to disclose a mere allegation, recognizing that unresolved complaints carry uncertain probative weight and that premature disclosure could itself be misleading or unfair. In Engineer F's case, however, the contractor license revocation is an adjudicated finding: a formal governmental determination that Engineer F committed a specific integrity violation. The synthesis of these two cases teaches that the disclosure obligation is calibrated to epistemic certainty and adjudicative finality: allegations occupy a zone of prudential weighing where disclosure may be advisable but is not categorically required, while adjudicated findings of wrongdoing - particularly those involving integrity violations in safety-sensitive domains - cross a threshold of materiality that makes non-disclosure on a professional employment application an ethics violation. The principle hierarchy is therefore: Omission Materiality (adjudicated findings) > Prudential Disclosure (allegations), with the Allegation-Adjudication Distinction serving as the operative boundary between the two regimes. This also implies that the moral responsibility for the informational gap created by the firm's narrow application drafting diminishes as the certainty and severity of the undisclosed finding increases - Engineer F cannot shift responsibility to the firm's imprecise drafting when the omitted fact is an adjudicated revocation for an integrity violation.

The Board's reasoning, read in light of its comparative analysis distinguishing BER Case 97-11, establishes a meaningful threshold: an adjudicated finding of wrongdoing - as opposed to a pending allegation or unresolved complaint - triggers a firm disclosure obligation on a professional employment application even when the disciplinary action arose outside the PE license domain. This allegation-adjudication distinction is not merely procedural; it reflects the epistemic difference between an unproven claim and a formally determined fact about the applicant's character. Because Engineer F's contractor license revocation was a completed adjudication, he could not invoke the uncertainty or reputational-harm rationale that might counsel caution about disclosing unresolved allegations. Furthermore, the Board's reasoning implies a continuing obligation: once hired, Engineer F's duty as a faithful agent and trustee to his employer would independently require disclosure of the revocation, since concealing a material adjudicated integrity finding from an employer who would reasonably consider it relevant to the employment relationship is inconsistent with the faithful agency canon. The ethical obligation thus did not expire at the moment of hiring but persisted as a relational duty throughout the employment relationship.

Engineer F's ethical obligation to disclose the contractor license revocation did not terminate upon submission of the employment application. Once hired, Engineer F entered into a fiduciary-adjacent relationship with his employer as a faithful agent and trustee under the NSPE Code. That relationship independently activates a continuing duty of candor regarding material facts bearing on his fitness and integrity. The moment Engineer F became aware that his employer was operating under a materially incomplete understanding of his professional history - an understanding Engineer F himself had created through omission - a renewed and arguably stronger disclosure obligation arose. This obligation would crystallize at the latest when the employer's reliance on the incomplete record became consequential, such as when Engineer F was assigned to projects, given supervisory authority, or held out to clients as a qualified professional. Silence in the face of a known material omission, once an employment relationship has been established, compounds rather than cures the original ethical breach.

Engineer F's disclosure obligation would be materially weaker if the contractor license revocation had arisen from a purely administrative or technical violation - such as a paperwork lapse or failure to renew on time - rather than from the integrity-implicating conduct of allowing an unlicensed individual unrelated to his firm to use his contractor license number. The ethical weight of a disclosure obligation scales with the character relevance of the underlying conduct. Administrative failures speak primarily to organizational competence; they do not necessarily implicate the honesty, trustworthiness, or professional integrity that the NSPE Code's whole-person character standard is designed to assess. By contrast, deliberately lending a license number to an unrelated unlicensed individual is an affirmative act of deception that undermines the very licensing system designed to protect the public - conduct that sits at the core of what the Code's integrity provisions address. The adjudicated nature of the revocation matters, but so does the moral character of the underlying act. A purely technical revocation might fall below the materiality threshold for mandatory disclosure on a PE employment application; the actual conduct here clearly does not.

The Board's conclusion that Engineer F had an ethical obligation to disclose the contractor license revocation rests not merely on the fact of revocation but on the nature of the underlying conduct: deliberately allowing an unlicensed individual unrelated to his firm to use his contractor license number. This act directly implicates the same professional integrity norms - honesty, faithful agency, and protection of the public - that govern PE licensure. Because the misconduct was not a technical or administrative lapse but an affirmative integrity violation adjudicated through a formal proceeding, the ethical obligation to disclose was heightened beyond what would apply to a purely procedural license deficiency. The safety-critical domain of fire sprinkler contracting further amplifies this materiality, since the public safety stakes of that field mirror those that animate engineering ethics codes generally. Accordingly, Engineer F's disclosure obligation was not merely triggered by the existence of a revocation but was intensified by the character of the conduct that produced it.

The fact that Engineer F's misconduct - lending his contractor license number to an unrelated unlicensed individual - directly implicates the same professional integrity norms that govern PE licensure creates a heightened, not merely equivalent, disclosure obligation. Licensing systems across engineering and contracting domains share a common foundational purpose: ensuring that only qualified, accountable individuals perform work that affects public safety. When an engineer subverts that system in one licensed domain by enabling unlicensed practice, the conduct speaks directly to his fitness to be trusted with the responsibilities of PE licensure in another. The fire protection context amplifies this further: fire sprinkler systems are life-safety infrastructure, and allowing an unlicensed individual to operate under a contractor license number in that domain is not a technical irregularity but a public safety violation. The cross-domain integrity relevance and the safety-critical nature of the field together elevate the materiality of the revocation well beyond what would apply to a license revocation in an unrelated, non-safety-sensitive domain.

The Board's conclusion implicitly rejects the argument that Engineer F could ethically rely on the narrow literal wording of the employment application question - which referenced only discipline 'in the practice of professional engineering' - to justify omitting the contractor license revocation. Under the NSPE Code's prohibition on deceptive acts and its requirement that engineers avoid statements containing material omissions that create false impressions, a technically accurate answer that is crafted to exploit a question's imprecise drafting is ethically equivalent to a misrepresentation when the omitted information is material to the purpose the question was plainly designed to serve. The evident purpose of the disciplinary question was to assess the applicant's character and fitness for professional trust, not merely to audit PE license status in a narrow administrative sense. Engineer F's exploitation of the question's literal scope to conceal an adjudicated integrity violation therefore constitutes the kind of artfully misleading omission the Code prohibits, regardless of whether his PE license itself was ever disciplined. The firm's failure to draft a more comprehensive question does not transfer moral responsibility for the omission to the firm; the duty of candor rests with the applicant.

The tension between Employment Application Question Scope Fidelity - the notion that an engineer may answer only what is literally asked - and the prohibition on technically true but misleading statements is resolved decisively in favor of the latter under the NSPE Code. The Code does not permit an engineer to treat a questioner's imprecise drafting as a loophole through which material integrity information may be withheld. The evident purpose of the employment application's disciplinary question was to assess whether the applicant had a history of adjudicated professional misconduct bearing on his fitness for a PE role. Engineer F's answer was technically accurate in its narrowest reading but functionally deceptive in its effect: it conveyed to the hiring firm that no relevant disciplinary history existed, when in fact an adjudicated revocation for an integrity violation in a safety-critical licensed domain did exist. The Code's provisions on deceptive acts and material omissions are not satisfied by literal accuracy alone; they require that the overall impression conveyed be truthful. Engineer F's answer failed that standard.

The tension between Employment Application Question Scope Fidelity - the idea that an applicant may legitimately confine answers to the literal scope of a question - and the Technically True But Misleading Statement Prohibition was resolved decisively in favor of the latter. The Board implicitly held that when a question's evident purpose is to assess character and fitness for professional trust, an engineer cannot exploit narrow drafting to suppress a material adjudicated integrity violation. The narrow wording of the application question ('disciplined in the practice of professional engineering or had his license suspended or revoked') did not exculpate Engineer F because the ethics code imposes a duty to interpret such questions according to their evident purpose rather than their most self-serving literal reading. This resolution teaches that Question Scope Fidelity is a subordinate principle: it governs genuinely ambiguous or irrelevant omissions, but it yields entirely when the omitted information is both material to the questioner's evident purpose and reflects an adjudicated finding of wrongdoing by the applicant. The principle hierarchy is therefore: Technically True But Misleading Statement Prohibition > Employment Application Question Scope Fidelity, whenever the gap between literal scope and evident purpose is exploited to conceal integrity-relevant conduct.

The Whole-Person Character Integrity Standard drawn from BER Case 75-5 can be reconciled with the ordinary jurisdictional boundaries of the engineering ethics code by recognizing that the Code's reach is not defined by the domain in which conduct occurs, but by whether the conduct is relevant to the engineer's fitness to fulfill professional engineering obligations. The Code does not claim jurisdiction over every aspect of an engineer's personal life; it does claim jurisdiction over conduct that bears on honesty, integrity, and public safety - wherever that conduct occurs. Engineer F's contractor license revocation arose outside his PE role but directly implicated the same integrity norms - prohibition on enabling unlicensed practice, protection of licensing system integrity, and public safety - that the PE ethics code enforces. The cross-domain character relevance, not the domain of occurrence, is the operative jurisdictional trigger. This reading avoids both over-extension of the Code into genuinely private conduct and under-extension that would allow engineers to compartmentalize integrity violations by domain.

The Whole-Person Character Integrity Standard - drawn from BER Case 75-5 and applied here to Engineer F's non-engineering contractor misconduct - was reconciled with the ordinarily bounded jurisdiction of the engineering ethics code by invoking the nature of the underlying conduct rather than the domain of the license. The Board's reasoning implicitly holds that the ethics code's jurisdiction extends beyond PE practice whenever the conduct in question directly implicates the same integrity norms - honesty, non-deception, faithful agency, and protection of public safety - that the code exists to enforce. Engineer F's act of lending his contractor license number to an unlicensed individual unrelated to his firm is not merely a regulatory infraction in a separate domain; it is a paradigmatic integrity violation that mirrors the very harms the engineering ethics code guards against: misrepresentation of qualifications, facilitation of unlicensed practice, and endangerment of public safety in a safety-critical field. The Domain-Relevance Amplification principle further reinforces this synthesis: because fire sprinkler contracting is directly safety-critical, the revocation carries heightened materiality that closes any residual gap between the contractor domain and the PE ethics domain. This case therefore teaches that the Whole-Person Character Integrity Standard activates - and overrides any domain-boundedness objection - when three conditions converge: (1) the non-PE conduct reflects an adjudicated integrity violation, (2) the violation mirrors core engineering ethics norms, and (3) the domain of the violation is safety-sensitive.

The Board's reasoning, read in light of its comparative analysis distinguishing BER Case 97-11, establishes a meaningful threshold: an adjudicated finding of wrongdoing - as opposed to a pending allegation or unresolved complaint - triggers a firm disclosure obligation on a professional employment application even when the disciplinary action arose outside the PE license domain. This allegation-adjudication distinction is not merely procedural; it reflects the epistemic difference between an unproven claim and a formally determined fact about the applicant's character. Because Engineer F's contractor license revocation was a completed adjudication, he could not invoke the uncertainty or reputational-harm rationale that might counsel caution about disclosing unresolved allegations. Furthermore, the Board's reasoning implies a continuing obligation: once hired, Engineer F's duty as a faithful agent and trustee to his employer would independently require disclosure of the revocation, since concealing a material adjudicated integrity finding from an employer who would reasonably consider it relevant to the employment relationship is inconsistent with the faithful agency canon. The ethical obligation thus did not expire at the moment of hiring but persisted as a relational duty throughout the employment relationship.

The Allegation-Adjudication Distinction drawn by the Board to differentiate Engineer F's case from BER Case 97-11 does not establish a binary rule that allegations never trigger disclosure while adjudications always do. Rather, it identifies adjudication as a sufficient condition for disclosure - a threshold that, once crossed, removes the prudential weighing that Engineer A in BER 97-11 was permitted to perform. Engineer A faced an unresolved allegation whose truth was contested and whose disclosure could itself cause harm; the Board recognized that a pending complaint does not carry the same evidentiary weight as a completed proceeding. Engineer F faced a formally adjudicated revocation - a finding of fact by a competent authority that the misconduct occurred. The distinction is not categorical but evidentiary: adjudication eliminates the uncertainty that justified Engineer A's more cautious approach and replaces it with a settled factual record that the engineer cannot in good faith treat as ambiguous or unresolved. Between the poles of mere allegation and formal adjudication lies a spectrum of intermediate findings - consent orders, informal settlements, deferred revocations - each of which would require its own materiality analysis.

The tension between Employment Application Question Scope Fidelity - the idea that an applicant may legitimately confine answers to the literal scope of a question - and the Technically True But Misleading Statement Prohibition was resolved decisively in favor of the latter. The Board implicitly held that when a question's evident purpose is to assess character and fitness for professional trust, an engineer cannot exploit narrow drafting to suppress a material adjudicated integrity violation. The narrow wording of the application question ('disciplined in the practice of professional engineering or had his license suspended or revoked') did not exculpate Engineer F because the ethics code imposes a duty to interpret such questions according to their evident purpose rather than their most self-serving literal reading. This resolution teaches that Question Scope Fidelity is a subordinate principle: it governs genuinely ambiguous or irrelevant omissions, but it yields entirely when the omitted information is both material to the questioner's evident purpose and reflects an adjudicated finding of wrongdoing by the applicant. The principle hierarchy is therefore: Technically True But Misleading Statement Prohibition > Employment Application Question Scope Fidelity, whenever the gap between literal scope and evident purpose is exploited to conceal integrity-relevant conduct.

The Allegation-Adjudication Distinction - used to differentiate Engineer F's case from BER Case 97-11, where Engineer A faced only a pending ethics complaint - resolves a latent tension between the Prudential Disclosure principle and the Omission Materiality principle by establishing a graduated disclosure threshold rather than a binary rule. Under BER 97-11, the Board declined to impose a categorical obligation on Engineer A to disclose a mere allegation, recognizing that unresolved complaints carry uncertain probative weight and that premature disclosure could itself be misleading or unfair. In Engineer F's case, however, the contractor license revocation is an adjudicated finding: a formal governmental determination that Engineer F committed a specific integrity violation. The synthesis of these two cases teaches that the disclosure obligation is calibrated to epistemic certainty and adjudicative finality: allegations occupy a zone of prudential weighing where disclosure may be advisable but is not categorically required, while adjudicated findings of wrongdoing - particularly those involving integrity violations in safety-sensitive domains - cross a threshold of materiality that makes non-disclosure on a professional employment application an ethics violation. The principle hierarchy is therefore: Omission Materiality (adjudicated findings) > Prudential Disclosure (allegations), with the Allegation-Adjudication Distinction serving as the operative boundary between the two regimes. This also implies that the moral responsibility for the informational gap created by the firm's narrow application drafting diminishes as the certainty and severity of the undisclosed finding increases - Engineer F cannot shift responsibility to the firm's imprecise drafting when the omitted fact is an adjudicated revocation for an integrity violation.

The fact that Engineer F's misconduct - lending his contractor license number to an unrelated unlicensed individual - directly implicates the same professional integrity norms that govern PE licensure creates a heightened, not merely equivalent, disclosure obligation. Licensing systems across engineering and contracting domains share a common foundational purpose: ensuring that only qualified, accountable individuals perform work that affects public safety. When an engineer subverts that system in one licensed domain by enabling unlicensed practice, the conduct speaks directly to his fitness to be trusted with the responsibilities of PE licensure in another. The fire protection context amplifies this further: fire sprinkler systems are life-safety infrastructure, and allowing an unlicensed individual to operate under a contractor license number in that domain is not a technical irregularity but a public safety violation. The cross-domain integrity relevance and the safety-critical nature of the field together elevate the materiality of the revocation well beyond what would apply to a license revocation in an unrelated, non-safety-sensitive domain.

The Whole-Person Character Integrity Standard - drawn from BER Case 75-5 and applied here to Engineer F's non-engineering contractor misconduct - was reconciled with the ordinarily bounded jurisdiction of the engineering ethics code by invoking the nature of the underlying conduct rather than the domain of the license. The Board's reasoning implicitly holds that the ethics code's jurisdiction extends beyond PE practice whenever the conduct in question directly implicates the same integrity norms - honesty, non-deception, faithful agency, and protection of public safety - that the code exists to enforce. Engineer F's act of lending his contractor license number to an unlicensed individual unrelated to his firm is not merely a regulatory infraction in a separate domain; it is a paradigmatic integrity violation that mirrors the very harms the engineering ethics code guards against: misrepresentation of qualifications, facilitation of unlicensed practice, and endangerment of public safety in a safety-critical field. The Domain-Relevance Amplification principle further reinforces this synthesis: because fire sprinkler contracting is directly safety-critical, the revocation carries heightened materiality that closes any residual gap between the contractor domain and the PE ethics domain. This case therefore teaches that the Whole-Person Character Integrity Standard activates - and overrides any domain-boundedness objection - when three conditions converge: (1) the non-PE conduct reflects an adjudicated integrity violation, (2) the violation mirrors core engineering ethics norms, and (3) the domain of the violation is safety-sensitive.

From a deontological perspective, Engineer F did not fulfill his categorical duty of honesty by answering 'no' to the employment application's disciplinary question. Kantian ethics requires not merely that statements be literally true but that they be offered in a spirit consistent with the rational agency of the recipient - that is, that they not be designed to produce a false belief in the listener's mind. Engineer F's answer, while technically accurate as to PE license discipline, was crafted to exploit the question's narrow wording in a way that would predictably cause the hiring firm to believe no relevant disciplinary history existed. This is precisely the kind of deception by omission that deontological ethics condemns as a violation of the duty of truthfulness. The categorical imperative further condemns the underlying maxim: if all engineers were permitted to answer disciplinary questions by reference only to the narrowest possible reading of the question's literal scope, the entire institution of employment application disclosure would be rendered meaningless. Engineer F's conduct fails both the universalizability test and the duty of non-deception.

From a virtue ethics standpoint, Engineer F's deliberate reliance on the narrow wording of the employment application question to omit an adjudicated integrity violation reveals a disposition toward legalistic self-protection that is fundamentally incompatible with the whole-person integrity standard expected of licensed professional engineers. A person of genuine honesty and integrity does not scan a question for its narrowest defensible reading in order to withhold information the questioner would plainly want to know. That behavior reflects not the stable virtue of honesty but its simulacrum - a performance of technical compliance designed to achieve the benefits of candor's reputation without its substance. The virtue ethics framework asks what a person of good character would do; a person of good character in Engineer F's position would have recognized that the hiring firm's evident purpose was to assess fitness and integrity, and would have disclosed the revocation voluntarily, perhaps with context, rather than exploiting a drafting gap. Engineer F's conduct is not merely a rule violation; it is a character revelation.

From a consequentialist perspective, Engineer F's omission produced net harm across multiple dimensions. The immediate harm was informational: the hiring firm was deprived of material data needed to make an informed employment decision, potentially placing Engineer F in a role for which the firm would not have hired him had it known the full record. The downstream harm was relational: when the firm independently discovered the revocation, the trust foundation of the employment relationship was retroactively compromised - not only by the original misconduct but by the deliberate concealment, which is often more damaging to professional relationships than the underlying act. The systemic harm was institutional: if engineers are permitted to exploit narrow application wording to conceal adjudicated integrity violations, the reliability of professional employment disclosures as a screening mechanism is eroded for the entire profession. Against these harms, the benefit to Engineer F - securing a position he might not otherwise have obtained - is both self-interested and contingent on the concealment remaining undiscovered. A consequentialist calculus that accounts for discovery probability, relational harm, and systemic effects yields a clear verdict against the omission.

From a deontological perspective, the NSPE Code's duty to act as a faithful agent and trustee does impose on Engineer F an obligation to interpret the employment application's disciplinary question according to its evident purpose rather than its narrowest literal scope. The faithful agent duty is not merely a duty to avoid active deception; it is an affirmative duty to serve the principal's legitimate informational interests. A hiring firm's evident purpose in asking about disciplinary history is to assess character and fitness - not to conduct a technical exercise in license-category taxonomy. An engineer who interprets such a question by its narrowest literal scope, knowing that the interpretation will produce a materially false impression, is not acting as a faithful agent; he is acting as an adversarial party seeking to minimize disclosure. The deontological duty of fidelity requires that Engineer F ask not 'what is the minimum I must disclose under the strictest reading of this question?' but rather 'what information does my principal need to make an informed decision?' The answer to the latter question clearly includes the contractor license revocation.

Had Engineer F voluntarily disclosed the contractor license revocation on the employment application - ideally with a brief contextual explanation of the circumstances and any remedial steps taken - the engineering firm would have been materially better positioned to make an informed hiring decision, and the integrity concerns that arose upon independent discovery would have been substantially mitigated or eliminated. Proactive disclosure transforms the character signal from concealment to candor: an applicant who discloses an adverse history before being asked demonstrates the very honesty and self-awareness that a hiring firm seeks in a professional engineer. The firm might still have declined to hire Engineer F, but that outcome would reflect a legitimate exercise of informed judgment rather than a trust betrayal. More importantly, if the firm had hired Engineer F with full knowledge of the revocation, the subsequent discovery would carry no additional sting - there would be nothing to discover that was not already known. The ethical and practical case for proactive disclosure is therefore not merely deontological but prudential: it is the strategy most consistent with long-term professional integrity and relational trust.

If Engineer F's situation had involved only an unresolved allegation of contractor misconduct - rather than a formal adjudicated revocation - the ethical obligation to disclose on the employment application would have been materially different and would have required the kind of prudential weighing that the Board in BER Case 97-11 permitted Engineer A to perform. An unresolved allegation is, by definition, a contested claim whose truth has not been established by a competent authority; disclosing it risks conveying a false negative impression based on an accusation that may ultimately be unfounded. The allegation-versus-adjudication distinction is therefore not merely procedural but epistemically significant: adjudication produces a settled factual record that the engineer cannot in good faith treat as ambiguous, while a pending allegation remains genuinely uncertain. Engineer F's case involved a completed revocation proceeding - an authoritative determination that the misconduct occurred - which eliminates the epistemic uncertainty that justified Engineer A's more cautious approach. The disclosure threshold calibration suggested by the two cases is: pending unresolved allegations permit prudential non-disclosure; formally adjudicated findings require disclosure, particularly when the underlying conduct implicates professional integrity.

If the employment application had been drafted more broadly - asking whether the applicant had ever had any professional or occupational license of any kind suspended, revoked, or disciplined - Engineer F would unambiguously have been compelled to disclose the contractor license revocation, and his failure to do so under such a question would have constituted an outright false statement rather than a misleading omission. The firm's failure to draft such a comprehensive question does reflect a due diligence gap, but that gap does not bear significant moral weight in distributing responsibility for the informational deficit. The ethical obligation to disclose material integrity information is not contingent on the questioner's drafting sophistication; it flows from the engineer's own affirmative duties under the Code. The firm's imprecise drafting created an opportunity for evasion that Engineer F exploited, but the exploitation itself - not the opportunity - is the ethical violation. A more comprehensive question would have eliminated the ambiguity Engineer F relied upon, but the absence of such a question did not create a moral permission to conceal.

If Engineer F's contractor license revocation had involved a domain entirely unrelated to engineering - such as a food service or real estate license - the ethical obligation to disclose on a PE employment application would be weaker, though not necessarily absent. The materiality of a non-PE license revocation to a PE employment application is a function of two variables: the character relevance of the underlying conduct and the domain relevance of the licensed activity. A food service license revocation for a health code violation speaks primarily to regulatory compliance in an unrelated field and carries limited character signal for PE fitness. A real estate license revocation for misrepresentation would carry stronger character relevance because it implicates honesty directly, even though the domain is unrelated. Engineer F's contractor license revocation in fire sprinkler contracting scores high on both variables: the underlying conduct - enabling unlicensed practice - directly implicates professional integrity norms shared across all licensed professions, and the domain - fire protection - is a safety-critical field whose public welfare stakes are directly analogous to those that PE licensure is designed to protect. The safety-critical nature of fire protection work amplifies the materiality of the revocation and supports disclosure even under a narrow reading of the application question.