Step 4: Review

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 may express publicly technical opinions that are founded upon knowledge of the facts and competence in the subject matter.

Engineers shall issue no statements, criticisms, or arguments on technical matters that are inspired or paid for by interested parties, unless they have prefaced their comments by explicitly identifying the interested parties on whose behalf they are speaking, and by revealing the existence of any interest the engineers may have in the matters.

Engineers shall acknowledge their errors and shall not distort or alter the facts.

Engineers shall advise their clients or employers when they believe a project will not be successful.

Engineers shall avoid the use of statements containing a material misrepresentation of fact or omitting a material fact.

It was unethical for Engineer B to issue his report without mentioning the failed operation of the testing equipment.

It was unethical for Engineer B to not communicate with any representative of Engineer A about the project.

It was unethical for Engineer B to not communicate with the contractor’s supervisor and workers who were on the job during construction.

It was unethical for Engineer B to issue his report without mentioning that the 19 piles questioned had, according to the driving records, met refusal.

Beyond the Board's finding that Engineer B's omission of the failed dynamic test equipment was unethical, the omission is compounded by the fact that the equipment failure was not merely a procedural footnote but a foundational validity question for the entire test program. A report that draws adverse conclusions about pile adequacy while suppressing the fact that the primary measurement instrument malfunctioned does not simply lack completeness - it affirmatively misrepresents the evidentiary basis of its conclusions. The reader of Engineer B's report would reasonably assume that the dynamic testing was successfully executed and that the results were technically reliable. That assumption, induced by silence, constitutes a material misrepresentation by omission under Code Section III.3.a, which prohibits statements containing omissions that would create a false impression. The ethical violation is therefore not only one of incompleteness but of constructive deception.

The Board's conclusion that Engineer B acted unethically by failing to communicate with Engineer A's representatives should be extended to recognize that this failure was not merely a procedural lapse but a violation of the due diligence standard that underlies any technically credible adverse opinion. Engineer B drew specific adverse conclusions about why 19 piles failed to reach predicted depth - including a theory about pile venting and closure plate air escape - without consulting the people who were physically present during the original pile driving and who could have confirmed or refuted that theory with firsthand observational knowledge. Under Code Section II.3.b, a publicly expressed technical opinion must be founded upon knowledge of the facts. An opinion about pile behavior that deliberately excludes available firsthand testimony about the conditions under which those piles were driven cannot satisfy that standard. The failure to consult is therefore not merely a communication lapse but an evidentiary deficiency that undermines the technical legitimacy of Engineer B's conclusions at their foundation.

The Board's finding that Engineer B failed to communicate with contractor supervisors and workers should be further analyzed in light of Engineer B's own post-report explanation. Engineer B stated that the pile driving records 'look suspicious' and raised a specific theory about pile venting through a closure plate. This means Engineer B had identified a concrete factual hypothesis - one that could have been tested by asking the workers and supervisors who installed those closure plates and drove those piles. The failure to consult available witnesses was therefore not a passive omission but an active choice to advance a theory while deliberately avoiding the most direct means of testing it. This pattern - forming an adverse conclusion, identifying a specific mechanism to explain it, and then declining to consult those who could verify or refute that mechanism - reflects a posture of advocacy rather than investigation, which is precisely the conduct Code Section II.3.c prohibits when it bars technical arguments inspired by self-interest or the interest of other parties rather than by objective analysis.

The Board's conclusion that Engineer B acted unethically by omitting the wave equation analysis and pile refusal data should be extended to address the structural severity of that omission. The omitted information was not merely supplementary context - it was directly exculpatory of Engineer A's design and directly contradicted Engineer B's adverse conclusions. Wave equation analysis applied to the pile driving records would have indicated load capacity several multiples above design requirements for the very 19 piles Engineer B declared inadequate. Omitting this from a report that purports to evaluate pile adequacy is not a matter of scope selection; it is the suppression of the primary counter-evidence to the report's central finding. Under Code Section III.3.a, an omission that would create a false impression of the facts is prohibited. A report concluding that 19 piles are inadequate, written with knowledge that accepted methodology applied to available records would show those same piles to be several times over-capacity, creates precisely such a false impression. The omission is not incidental but constitutive of the report's misleading character.

Across all four Board conclusions, a unifying analytical extension is that Engineer B's conduct represents a systematic pattern rather than a collection of isolated lapses. The omission of equipment failure, the refusal to consult available witnesses, the exclusion of wave equation results, and the post-report issuance of contradictory explanations are not independent errors - they form a coherent pattern of client-aligned selective reporting in which every available piece of evidence favorable to Engineer A was either ignored, excluded, or explained away after the fact. This pattern is analytically significant because it shifts the ethical characterization from negligence to something closer to deliberate advocacy dressed as objective engineering analysis. Code Section II.3.c explicitly prohibits technical statements inspired by the interest of other parties, and Code Section III.1.a prohibits distortion or alteration of facts. When the totality of Engineer B's choices is viewed together - the vibratory hammer substitution, the pre-count hammer drops, the non-consultation of witnesses, the wave equation omission, the equipment failure suppression, and the contradictory scope-versus-disbelief explanations - the cumulative picture is of a report engineered to serve the municipality's litigation position rather than to objectively evaluate the piles. This systemic dimension of the violation is more serious than any single omission and warrants recognition as an independent analytical conclusion beyond the Board's item-by-item findings.

The Board's conclusions collectively leave unaddressed the question of whether Engineer B's scope-of-work defense - the claim that pile driving records were outside the contractual scope - could ever constitute a legitimate ethical shield. The analytical answer is that it cannot, for a specific structural reason: the scope-of-work argument might excuse Engineer B from proactively seeking out records that were not provided, but it cannot excuse Engineer B from disclosing records that were available and that directly contradicted the report's adverse conclusions. The pile driving records existed, were accessible, and showed that the 19 questioned piles had been driven to essential refusal. Once Engineer B was aware of those records - as the post-report explanation about 'suspicious' records confirms - the scope-of-work limitation became irrelevant to the disclosure obligation. An engineer cannot contractually agree to ignore exculpatory evidence when drawing adverse professional conclusions, because the obligation of completeness and non-selectivity under Code Section II.3.a runs to the profession and the public, not merely to the client. The scope-of-work defense therefore fails not because scope limitations are never legitimate, but because they cannot override the engineer's independent professional obligation to disclose material facts that bear directly on the validity of adverse conclusions being issued under the engineer's professional seal.

In response to Q101: Engineer B's two contradictory post-report explanations - first claiming the pile driving records were outside his scope of work, then claiming he simply did not believe them - constitute an independent ethical violation distinct from the substantive omissions in the report itself. The scope-of-work explanation, if true, would mean Engineer B never evaluated the records at all; the disbelief explanation, if true, would mean he evaluated them and consciously rejected them without disclosure. These two positions are mutually exclusive, and Engineer B offered both without reconciliation. Under Code Section III.1.a, engineers shall not distort or alter the facts, and the issuance of contradictory professional justifications for a consequential investigative choice - particularly one that affected adverse conclusions about another engineer's work - constitutes a distortion of the factual basis of the report's methodology. The honesty obligation is not limited to the report document itself; it extends to how an engineer accounts for his professional choices when queried. Engineer B's failure to provide a coherent, truthful account of why the pile driving records were excluded independently violates the honesty and non-distortion obligations of the Code, regardless of whether the underlying omissions in the report are separately found to be violations.

In response to Q102: Engineer B's use of a vibratory hammer in the test pile program - when the original piles were not driven with a vibratory hammer - and his failure to replicate original penetration depth conditions constitute an independent ethical violation that precedes and underlies the written report's omissions. An engineer drawing adverse technical conclusions about a pile design based on test results is ethically obligated to ensure that those tests replicate the conditions of the original work with sufficient fidelity to make the comparison valid. When Engineer B substituted a vibratory hammer, failed to achieve equivalent penetration depth, and allowed pre-count hammer drops that Engineer A's geotechnical consultant credibly testified would have broken the pile bond and undervalued skin friction, he produced test results that were structurally incomparable to the original pile driving program. Issuing adverse conclusions derived from such a compromised test program, without disclosing the methodological departures, violates Code Section II.3.a's requirement that professional reports be objective and truthful, and Code Section II.3.b's requirement that technical opinions be founded upon knowledge of the facts and competent engineering. The methodological inconsistency is not merely a technical imperfection; it is an ethical failure because Engineer B drew definitive adverse conclusions from data he knew or should have known was not a valid basis for comparison with the original work.

In response to Q103: It was unethical for Engineer B to issue adverse conclusions about Engineer A's pile design without first notifying Engineer A that such an evaluation was underway. Engineer A's on-site representatives possessed direct firsthand knowledge of the pile driving conditions, the accuracy of the pile driving records, and the circumstances surrounding the 19 piles that Engineer B concluded were inadequate. This knowledge was material to the very conclusions Engineer B was drawing. The ethical obligation here is not merely procedural courtesy; it is grounded in Code Section II.3.b's requirement that technical opinions be founded upon knowledge of the facts. An engineer who draws adverse conclusions about another engineer's design while deliberately bypassing available witnesses who could confirm or refute the factual premises of those conclusions has not founded his opinion on knowledge of the facts - he has founded it on a selectively assembled subset of facts. Furthermore, Code Section III.3.a prohibits statements containing material omissions that create false impressions. A report that omits the perspective of the engineer whose work is being adversely evaluated, when that engineer's representatives were available and willing to provide relevant testimony, creates a false impression of investigative completeness. The Board's conclusion that Engineer B's failure to communicate with Engineer A's representatives was unethical is correct, and this analysis extends that conclusion by identifying the specific mechanism: the failure to consult available witnesses directly undermined the factual foundation required to support the adverse technical opinion Engineer B issued.

In response to Q104: While the primary ethical burden falls on Engineer B as the licensed professional, the municipality's role in defining Engineer B's scope of work in a manner that may have structurally precluded complete and objective reporting raises a secondary ethical question about institutional responsibility in adversarial engineering engagements. However, under the NSPE Code, the licensed engineer bears non-delegable professional obligations that cannot be contracted away by a client's scope definition. Code Section II.3.c prohibits technical statements inspired by self-interest or the interest of other parties, and Code Section III.3.a prohibits material omissions that create false impressions - neither provision contains an exception for client-defined scope limitations. Engineer B's own post-report statement that the pile driving records were 'not in our scope of work' attempts to transfer ethical responsibility to the municipality's contractual framing, but this transfer is ethically impermissible. A licensed engineer who accepts an engagement to evaluate pile adequacy and issue a professional report cannot discharge his completeness and objectivity obligations by pointing to a scope-of-work document that did not require him to consult material evidence. The scope-of-work limitation is an incomplete ethical defense precisely because professional obligations are imposed by the Code on the engineer, not negotiated away by the client. If Engineer B believed the defined scope was too narrow to permit an objective and complete report, his ethical obligation was to expand the scope, disclose the limitation prominently in the report, or decline the engagement - not to issue adverse conclusions while silently omitting contradictory evidence.

In response to Q201: The tension between the Faithful Agent Obligation and the Completeness and Non-Selectivity Obligation is real but resolvable under the NSPE Code, and the Code resolves it unambiguously in favor of completeness. The Faithful Agent Obligation requires Engineer B to serve the municipality's legitimate interests, but it does not authorize selective reporting that omits material findings favorable to the opposing party. Code Section II.3.c explicitly prohibits technical statements inspired by the interest of other parties, which means the faithful agent obligation cannot be used to justify omitting wave equation results or equipment failure disclosures simply because those findings would weaken the municipality's litigation position. The resolution the Code demands is that a retained litigation expert serve the client's legitimate interest in obtaining an accurate, complete, and professionally defensible technical assessment - not the client's tactical interest in receiving a selectively favorable report. An engineer who produces a selectively favorable report ultimately disserves even the client, because the report's credibility is undermined when the omissions are exposed, as occurred here when Engineer A's geotechnical consultant testified about the equipment failure and wave equation results. The faithful agent obligation and the completeness obligation are therefore not genuinely in conflict when properly understood: a faithful agent in the professional engineering context is one who provides complete and objective analysis, not one who filters findings to serve litigation strategy.

In response to Q202: A contractually defined scope of work cannot legitimately excuse an engineer from consulting material evidence that is readily available and directly relevant to the adverse conclusions being drawn. The scope-of-work defense fails on both logical and ethical grounds. Logically, if Engineer B's scope did not include review of pile driving records, then Engineer B lacked the evidentiary foundation to draw adverse conclusions about the 19 piles - because the pile driving records were the primary available evidence about what actually happened during original pile installation. An engineer cannot simultaneously claim that reviewing the pile driving records was outside his scope and that he is competent to conclude that the 19 piles were inadequate, because the adequacy conclusion depends on understanding the original driving conditions that the records document. Ethically, Code Section II.3.b requires that technical opinions be founded upon knowledge of the facts. A scope-of-work limitation that excludes the primary factual record relevant to the opinion being issued does not satisfy this requirement; it defeats it. The Available Evidence Consultation Obligation is not waived by contractual scope definition. If the scope was genuinely too narrow to permit a fact-grounded opinion, Engineer B was obligated to either expand the scope, qualify the opinion prominently, or decline to issue the adverse conclusion. Issuing an unqualified adverse conclusion while hiding behind a scope limitation that excluded the most relevant contradictory evidence is precisely the kind of material omission that Code Section III.3.a prohibits.

In response to Q203: The tension between the Technical Facts Non-Adversarial Character principle and the Adversarial Engagement Objectivity Obligation reveals a genuine structural problem in how litigation engineering is practiced, but the NSPE Code resolves that tension clearly in favor of objective disclosure over client advocacy. The Technical Facts Non-Adversarial Character principle holds that factual findings - such as wave equation results showing piles driven to essential refusal at several multiples of design load, or the failure of dynamic test equipment - are not legitimately subject to adversarial framing. These are not matters of engineering judgment or interpretive discretion; they are documented facts. The Adversarial Engagement Objectivity Obligation recognizes that engineers retained in litigation contexts face structural pressure to produce client-favorable findings, but it does not relax the objectivity standard - it applies it with heightened vigilance precisely because the adversarial context creates the greatest temptation to depart from it. Code Section II.3.c's prohibition on statements inspired by the interest of other parties is most directly applicable in exactly this context. The internal tension in litigation engineering practice - where engineers are paid by one party to evaluate the work of another - is not resolved by the Code permitting selective reporting; it is resolved by the Code requiring that the engineer's professional obligations to objectivity and completeness override the client's tactical preferences. Engineer B's report illustrates what happens when this tension is resolved in the wrong direction: factual findings that contradict the client's litigation position are omitted, and the resulting report is neither professionally defensible nor ultimately useful to the client whose credibility depends on the report's integrity.

In response to Q204: The burden of determining materiality of an omission rests with the reporting engineer, not the client, and the professional standard - not the engineer's subjective judgment - defines the threshold. The Omission Materiality Threshold principle requires disclosure when an omission crosses a threshold of significance, but that threshold is not set by what the engineer finds convenient to report or what the client wishes to receive. In this case, the wave equation analysis showing that the 19 questioned piles had been driven to essential refusal at several multiples of design load capacity is unambiguously material: it is the single most important piece of evidence bearing on whether those piles were adequate, and it directly contradicts Engineer B's adverse conclusion. Similarly, the failure of dynamic test equipment is material because it undermines the reliability of the test results on which Engineer B's conclusions were based. No reasonable professional standard could classify either of these omissions as below the materiality threshold. The ethical burden falls on Engineer B as the licensed professional to identify and disclose material findings, including those that contradict his conclusions. Code Section III.3.a's prohibition on statements containing material omissions that create false impressions does not permit the engineer to delegate materiality determinations to the client or to define materiality by reference to what supports the client's position. The materiality standard is objective: would a competent reviewing engineer, or a party relying on the report, consider the omitted information significant to evaluating the report's conclusions? By that standard, both omissions in Engineer B's report were clearly material, and the failure to disclose them violated the Code.

In response to Q301: From a deontological perspective, Engineer B violated a categorical duty of completeness and non-selectivity by omitting the failed dynamic test equipment from his report, and this violation is independent of whether the omission ultimately affected the structural conclusions about the 19 piles. The deontological analysis is straightforward: the duty to report truthfully and completely is not a consequentialist obligation that is discharged if the omitted information would not have changed the outcome. Code Section II.3.a requires that professional reports be objective and truthful, and Code Section III.3.a prohibits material omissions that create false impressions. These are categorical obligations. A report that presents test results without disclosing that the test equipment failed during the test is not a truthful report, regardless of whether the engineer believes the equipment failure did not affect the results. The engineer's subjective belief about the impact of the equipment failure does not discharge the duty to disclose the failure; it is precisely the kind of judgment that the reader of the report - and the parties relying on it - are entitled to make for themselves. By omitting the equipment failure, Engineer B substituted his own undisclosed judgment for the informed evaluation of the report's audience, which is the paradigmatic form of the deontological violation the completeness obligation is designed to prevent.

In response to Q302: From a virtue ethics perspective, Engineer B failed to demonstrate the professional integrity expected of a competent and honest engineering expert. The virtue ethics analysis focuses not on whether specific rules were violated but on whether Engineer B exhibited the character traits - honesty, diligence, intellectual courage, and professional integrity - that define a trustworthy engineering expert. The contradictory post-report explanations are particularly revealing from this perspective: a virtuous engineer, when queried about investigative choices, would provide a transparent, coherent, and honest account of those choices, even if that account revealed limitations or errors. Instead, Engineer B offered two mutually exclusive explanations - scope exclusion and disbelief - without acknowledging the contradiction or explaining which was true. This pattern of explanation suggests not an engineer who made a difficult judgment call and can account for it, but an engineer who is constructing post-hoc justifications for choices made on other grounds. The virtue ethics framework also highlights Engineer B's failure of intellectual courage: a virtuous expert retained in an adversarial context would have the professional courage to report findings that contradict the client's position, understanding that his value as an expert depends on his credibility, and his credibility depends on his completeness. Engineer B's selective reporting reflects a failure of the character virtues that the engineering profession depends on its members to exhibit, particularly when retained in high-stakes adversarial proceedings where the temptation to accommodate client preferences is greatest.

In response to Q303: From a consequentialist perspective, Engineer B's selective omissions produced a net harm that substantially outweighed any benefit derived from the narrowly scoped report he delivered. The identifiable harms include: reputational injury to Engineer A, whose pile design was publicly characterized as inadequate based on a report that omitted the most significant evidence of adequacy; distortion of the mediation record, which was corrected only because Engineer A's independent geotechnical consultant testified about the equipment failure and wave equation results - testimony that should not have been necessary if Engineer B had reported completely; potential disservice to the municipality as client, whose litigation position was ultimately undermined by the exposure of the report's omissions and whose credibility as a party relying on expert testimony was damaged; and harm to the integrity of the engineering expert witness process more broadly, as selective reporting by retained experts erodes the reliability of technical testimony in dispute resolution proceedings. The only identifiable benefit of the selective report was a short-term tactical advantage for the municipality in the mediation - an advantage that was negated when the omissions were exposed. A consequentialist analysis therefore confirms what the deontological and virtue ethics analyses independently establish: Engineer B's selective reporting was ethically indefensible from every major normative framework, and the Board's conclusions finding multiple violations are well-supported across all three analytical traditions.

In response to Q304: From a deontological perspective, Engineer B breached a duty of due diligence by drawing adverse technical conclusions about Engineer A's pile design without first consulting available on-site representatives, contractor supervisors, and workers who possessed direct firsthand knowledge of the pile driving conditions. The deontological duty of due diligence in technical investigation is grounded in Code Section II.3.b's requirement that technical opinions be founded upon knowledge of the facts. This is not a consequentialist obligation that is satisfied if the engineer happens to reach the correct conclusion without consulting available witnesses; it is a procedural duty that requires the engineer to make reasonable efforts to obtain the relevant facts before issuing an opinion. Engineer B's failure to consult Engineer A's on-site representatives - who were available and willing to testify about the accuracy of the pile driving records - and his failure to inquire of contractors, workers, or others present during construction, meant that his adverse conclusions were issued without the factual foundation the Code requires. The deontological analysis is particularly sharp here because the witnesses Engineer B failed to consult were the primary available sources of firsthand knowledge about the very conditions his adverse conclusions addressed. A duty of due diligence that does not require consultation of available firsthand witnesses before issuing adverse professional conclusions would be a duty without meaningful content. Engineer B's failure to consult these witnesses was therefore not merely a procedural oversight; it was a substantive breach of the investigative diligence obligation that underlies the requirement that technical opinions be fact-grounded.

In response to Q401: If Engineer B had disclosed the dynamic test equipment failure in his report, the municipality, the mediating parties, and the reviewing technical community would have been in a position to properly weight the test pile results - and Engineer B's adverse conclusions about the 19 piles would almost certainly not have survived scrutiny under those conditions. The equipment failure is not a peripheral detail; it goes to the reliability of the test data on which Engineer B's conclusions were based. A disclosed equipment failure would have prompted the mediating parties and their technical advisors to ask whether the test results were valid, whether the failure affected the blow count records, and whether the test program should be repeated under controlled conditions. These are exactly the questions that Engineer A's geotechnical consultant raised in testimony - questions that were only necessary because Engineer B had not raised them himself. The counterfactual disclosure would also have interacted with the other methodological departures - the vibratory hammer substitution, the pre-count hammer drops, the failure to replicate penetration depth - to create a picture of a test program whose results were of limited comparability to the original pile driving. Under those conditions of full disclosure, the adverse conclusions about the 19 piles would have been recognized as resting on a compromised evidentiary foundation, and the mediation record would have reflected a more balanced and accurate technical picture.

In response to Q402: If Engineer B had consulted Engineer A's on-site representatives and the contractor's supervisors and workers before finalizing his report, it is highly probable that he would have obtained information sufficient to either substantiate or abandon his theory that the 19 piles were inadequate - and the report's conclusions would likely have materially differed. The on-site representatives were available to testify as to the accuracy of the pile driving records, which Engineer B's post-report statements reveal he found suspicious. A direct consultation would have allowed Engineer B to either confirm his suspicions with specific factual evidence or discover that the records were accurate and that the 19 piles had in fact been driven to essential refusal. The contractor's supervisors and workers could have provided firsthand accounts of the driving conditions, the behavior of the piles during installation, and any anomalies that might explain why the 19 piles reached refusal before predicted depth. This information was directly relevant to Engineer B's theory about why the piles met driving refusal prior to predicted depth - a theory he advanced in his report without having consulted the people most likely to know the answer. The counterfactual consultation would have either strengthened Engineer B's conclusions with factual support or revealed that his theory was unsupported, in either case producing a more professionally defensible and factually grounded report than the one he issued.

In response to Q403: If Engineer B had applied wave equation analysis to the pile driving records and disclosed that the 19 questioned piles had been driven to essential refusal - indicating load capacity several multiples above design requirements - the municipality's litigation position would have been materially weakened, and this potential outcome provides the most plausible explanation for Engineer B's selective reporting choices. The wave equation analysis was an accepted methodology directly applicable to the pile driving records, and its results would have shown that the 19 piles Engineer B characterized as inadequate were in fact among the strongest piles in the foundation, having been driven to refusal at capacities far exceeding design requirements. This finding would have directly contradicted Engineer B's depth-based adequacy analysis and would have required either a reconciliation of the two methodologies or an acknowledgment that the depth-based analysis was insufficient standing alone. The municipality's litigation position - that Engineer A's pile design was inadequate and that the settlement cost should be borne primarily by Engineer A - would have been substantially undermined by a report that acknowledged the 19 piles met refusal at several multiples of design load. The pattern of omissions in Engineer B's report - excluding wave equation results, excluding equipment failure disclosure, excluding consultation with Engineer A's representatives, excluding consultation with on-site witnesses - is consistent with a systematic effort to produce a report that supported the municipality's litigation position rather than a complete and objective technical assessment. Code Section II.3.c's prohibition on statements inspired by the interest of other parties is precisely targeted at this pattern of conduct.

The tension between the Faithful Agent Obligation - which required Engineer B to serve the municipality's litigation interests - and the Completeness and Non-Selectivity Obligation - which required Engineer B to report all material findings regardless of their effect on the client's position - was resolved by the Board unambiguously in favor of completeness. The case establishes that the Faithful Agent Obligation does not license selective reporting; it is bounded by the engineer's independent duty to be objective and truthful. Engineer B's role as a retained litigation expert did not transform him into an advocate whose report could be shaped by the client's adversarial interests. The NSPE Code provisions requiring objective and truthful professional reports, prohibiting material omissions, and forbidding statements inspired by self-interest or the interests of other parties operate as a ceiling on what client loyalty can demand. This case teaches that when the Faithful Agent Obligation and the Completeness Obligation appear to conflict, the conflict is resolved not by balancing but by subordination: client loyalty is legitimate only within the space defined by the engineer's independent professional obligations, and it cannot occupy that space by displacing them.

The Scope-of-Work Limitation as Incomplete Ethical Defense principle and the Available Evidence Consultation Obligation were placed in direct tension by Engineer B's first post-report explanation - that the pile driving records were outside his scope of work - and the Board's resolution of that tension carries significant doctrinal weight. The case establishes that a contractually defined scope of work cannot function as an ethical shield when the omitted evidence is (a) readily available, (b) directly material to the adverse conclusions being drawn, and (c) of a character that, if disclosed, would have permitted the reviewing community to properly evaluate those conclusions. The scope-of-work defense is legitimate when it defines the boundaries of an engineer's affirmative investigative duties; it is not legitimate when it is invoked to justify the omission of known, available, and dispositive evidence from a report whose conclusions depend on that evidence being absent. This distinction - between a scope limitation that defines what an engineer must do and a scope limitation invoked to conceal what an engineer already knows - is the critical line the Board implicitly drew. Engineer B's second explanation, that the records were simply not believed, inadvertently confirmed that the records were known and considered, which collapsed the scope-of-work defense entirely and revealed the omission as an intentional choice rather than a jurisdictional boundary.

The Technical Facts Non-Adversarial Character principle - which holds that objective technical findings such as wave equation results, pile driving refusal data, and equipment failure are not legitimately subject to adversarial framing - and the Adversarial Engagement Objectivity Obligation together reveal an internal tension in litigation engineering practice that this case resolves clearly in favor of objective disclosure. The case teaches that the adversarial character of the proceeding in which an engineer is retained does not alter the non-adversarial character of the technical facts the engineer uncovers. Engineer B's report treated factual findings - that the 19 questioned piles had been driven to essential refusal, that wave equation analysis indicated load capacity several multiples above design requirements, and that the dynamic test equipment had failed - as if they were adversarial positions subject to selective deployment. The Board's conclusions reject that framing entirely. Technical facts belong to the record, not to the retaining party, and an engineer who omits them to preserve a client-favorable narrative has not merely failed a completeness obligation but has misrepresented the technical reality of the situation. This principle prioritization - objective technical disclosure over adversarial client service - is the central ethical lesson of the case, and it applies with equal force whether the omitted facts are favorable to the opposing engineer, unfavorable to the client, or merely inconvenient to the theory the report advances.

Was it ethical for Engineer B to not have included the failed operation of the test equipment in his report?

Was it ethical for Engineer B not to communicate with any representatives of Engineer A about the project?

Was it ethical for Engineer B not to communicate with the contractor’s supervisor and workers who were on the job during construction?

Was it ethical for Engineer B to issue his report without mentioning that the 19 piles questioned had, according to the driving records, met refusal?

Does the fact that Engineer B offered two contradictory post-report explanations for ignoring the pile driving records - first claiming it was outside the scope of work, then claiming the records were simply not believed - constitute a violation of the honesty and non-distortion obligations independent of the report's substantive omissions?

To what extent does Engineer B's use of a vibratory hammer and failure to replicate original driving conditions - rather than merely the omissions in the written report - independently constitute an ethical violation by producing a test whose results were structurally incomparable to the original pile driving program?

Was it ethical for Engineer B to issue adverse conclusions about the adequacy of Engineer A's pile design without first notifying Engineer A that such an evaluation was underway, given that Engineer A's on-site representatives held material factual knowledge directly relevant to Engineer B's conclusions?

Does the municipality's retention of Engineer B in an adversarial litigation context create any ethical obligations for the municipality itself - for example, an obligation to ensure that Engineer B's scope of work was defined broadly enough to permit complete and objective reporting - or does the ethical burden fall entirely on Engineer B as the licensed professional?

Does the Faithful Agent Obligation - which requires Engineer B to serve the municipality's litigation interests - conflict with the Completeness and Non-Selectivity Obligation, which requires Engineer B to report all material findings including those favorable to Engineer A, and if so, how should a retained litigation expert resolve that tension?

Does the Scope-of-Work Limitation as Incomplete Ethical Defense conflict with the Available Evidence Consultation Obligation - that is, can a contractually defined scope of work ever legitimately excuse an engineer from consulting material evidence that is readily available and directly relevant to the adverse conclusions being drawn?

Does the Technical Facts Non-Adversarial Character principle - which holds that factual findings such as wave equation results and equipment failure are not legitimately subject to adversarial framing - conflict with the Adversarial Engagement Objectivity Obligation in a way that reveals an internal tension in how litigation engineering is practiced, and does the NSPE Code resolve that tension in favor of objective disclosure over client advocacy?

Does the Omission Materiality Threshold principle - which requires disclosure only when an omission crosses a threshold of significance - conflict with the Completeness Violated By Engineer B Omitting Equipment Failure principle in a way that raises the question of who bears the burden of determining materiality: the reporting engineer, the client, or the profession's objective standard?

From a deontological perspective, did Engineer B violate a categorical duty of completeness and non-selectivity by omitting the failed dynamic test equipment from his report, regardless of whether that omission ultimately affected the structural conclusions about the 19 piles?

From a virtue ethics perspective, did Engineer B demonstrate the professional integrity expected of a competent and honest engineering expert when he issued contradictory post-report explanations - first claiming the pile driving records were outside his scope of work, then claiming he simply disbelieved them - rather than transparently accounting for his investigative choices?

From a consequentialist perspective, did Engineer B's selective omission of wave equation analysis results and pile driving refusal data produce a net harm - including reputational injury to Engineer A, distortion of the mediation record, and potential disservice to the municipality as client - that outweighed any benefit derived from the narrowly scoped report he delivered?

From a deontological perspective, did Engineer B breach a duty of due diligence by drawing adverse technical conclusions about Engineer A's pile design without first consulting available on-site representatives, contractor supervisors, and workers who possessed direct firsthand knowledge of the pile driving conditions - knowledge that could have confirmed or refuted his theories?

If Engineer B had disclosed the dynamic test equipment failure in his report, would the municipality, the mediating parties, and the reviewing technical community have been able to properly weight the test pile results - and would Engineer B's adverse conclusions about the 19 piles have survived scrutiny under those conditions?

If Engineer B had consulted Engineer A's on-site representatives and the contractor's supervisors and workers before finalizing his report, would he have obtained information sufficient to either substantiate or abandon his theory that the 19 piles were inadequate - and would the report's conclusions have materially differed?

If Engineer B had applied wave equation analysis to the pile driving records and disclosed that the 19 questioned piles had been driven to essential refusal - indicating load capacity several multiples above design requirements - would the municipality's litigation position have been materially weakened, and does that potential outcome explain Engineer B's selective reporting choices?

If Engineer B had declined the engagement on the grounds that the adversarial litigation context created irreconcilable pressure to produce a client-favorable rather than objectively complete report, would that refusal have better served the public interest, the integrity of the mediation proceeding, and Engineer B's own professional standing than the selective report he ultimately issued?

The 90-pile foundation design represents Engineer A's original professional technical judgment, grounded in geotechnical facts and design obligations, which subsequently became the subject of adversarial scrutiny and the basis against which Engineer B's testing program was evaluated.

The mediation settlement agreement represents the resolution of the adversarial proceeding between the municipality and Engineer A, and its integrity depends on the completeness and honesty of testimony provided by both engineers during mediation, implicating transparency obligations for all parties.

The municipality's retention of Engineer B as an adversarial testing expert triggers the full suite of professional obligations requiring objectivity, completeness, and non-selective reporting, while simultaneously creating the structural conflict that constrained Engineer B's ability to coordinate with Engineer A or preserve peer review opportunities.

Engineer A's retention of an independent geotechnical observer fulfills the obligation to preserve peer technical review opportunity and ensure factual completeness, directly countering Engineer B's selective reporting by introducing an independent technical voice that consulted available evidence and provided contradicting testimony.

Engineer B's decision to substitute a vibratory hammer in the test pile program directly violates the methodological consistency obligation requiring that comparative testing replicate original conditions, and the resulting compromised test conditions - combined with the failure to disclose equipment failure in the concluding report - constitute the central technical and ethical breach of the case.

By deciding to begin hammer drop counts before the pile reached a consistent set condition, Engineer B compromised the methodological fidelity of the comparative test program, violating the obligation to replicate original test conditions and undermining the factual grounding required for any adverse technical opinion about Engineer A's pile design.

Driving test piles to inconsistent depths relative to the original dock foundation piles invalidated the comparative basis of the test program, violating the methodological consistency obligation and rendering Engineer B's adverse conclusions about pile adequacy factually ungrounded because the test conditions did not replicate the original installation parameters.

Engineer B's deliberate exclusion of the contractor, on-site workers, and Engineer A's representatives from the investigative process violated the obligation to consult all available evidence before issuing an adverse technical opinion, and foreclosed the peer review opportunity that would have allowed Engineer A to identify and correct methodological deficiencies in the test program.

Engineer B's deliberate omission of wave equation analysis results and dynamic test equipment failure from the concluding report constitutes the most direct and comprehensive violation of professional reporting obligations, breaching completeness, objectivity, faithful agent, and non-selectivity duties simultaneously while the adversarial litigation context provides no ethical exemption for such material omissions.

Engineer B's post-report issuance of mutually contradictory justifications - alternately claiming the pile driving records were outside the scope of work and that he simply disbelieved them - violates the honesty and professional consistency obligations by revealing that neither explanation is a candid account of the actual basis for the omission, thereby compounding the original reporting deficiencies with artfully misleading testimony.

This question emerged because Engineer B's report omitted a known equipment failure that directly compromised the methodological integrity of the test program, creating a collision between the professional obligation to report completely and the temptation to serve the client's adversarial interests through selective disclosure. The question is ethically live precisely because the omission was not accidental - the equipment failure was a witnessed event - making the silence a deliberate editorial choice requiring justification.

This question arose because Engineer B occupied a dual role - technical investigator and litigation expert - and the norms governing those roles conflict: technical investigation demands consultation with all knowledgeable parties, while adversarial expert engagement creates structural separation from the opposing side. The ethical question emerges from the unresolved tension between these role-specific norms when Engineer B's conclusions directly impugned Engineer A's professional work without giving Engineer A's representatives any opportunity to provide context.

This question emerged because the contractor's supervisors and workers represented irreplaceable firsthand knowledge about original pile driving conditions, equipment behavior, and site anomalies - knowledge that could have materially altered Engineer B's conclusions - yet Engineer B issued definitive adverse findings without accessing this evidence. The ethical question is sharpened by the fact that the omission of witness consultation parallels the omission of documentary evidence, suggesting a pattern of selective fact-gathering rather than an isolated procedural gap.

This question arose because the pile driving records showing refusal were the most directly relevant pre-existing evidence bearing on the adequacy of the 19 questioned piles, and their omission from Engineer B's report created a one-sided evidentiary picture that supported the municipality's litigation position while suppressing the strongest counter-evidence. The ethical question is particularly acute because Engineer B later offered two mutually inconsistent explanations for the omission - scope limitation and disbelief - suggesting that neither explanation was the genuine reason, which itself raises the question of whether the omission was strategically motivated.

This question emerged because the contradictory explanations reveal that Engineer B's justification for the pile driving records omission was not grounded in a consistent professional rationale but was instead adapted to the argumentative needs of successive adversarial moments - a pattern that implicates the honesty obligation as a freestanding concern separate from the substantive report deficiencies. The question is analytically distinct from Q4 because it targets the integrity of Engineer B's professional self-accounting rather than the report's content, asking whether an engineer who cannot consistently explain a material omission has violated honesty norms through the explanatory conduct itself.

This question emerged because Engineer B's test program deviated from the original pile driving program in multiple simultaneous and undisclosed ways - equipment type, pre-count hammer drops, and penetration depth - each of which independently undermines comparability, forcing the question of whether the test design itself, apart from any reporting omission, constitutes a freestanding ethical violation. The question is structurally necessary because the written report omissions and the test design defects are analytically separable wrongs, and conflating them risks obscuring whether Engineer B's ethical breach was in the field or at the desk.

This question arose because Engineer A's on-site representatives possessed material factual knowledge - directly relevant to Engineer B's adverse conclusions - that Engineer B neither sought nor acknowledged, and because the adversarial litigation context created a structural incentive for Engineer B to avoid contact with Engineer A's team, placing professional ethics obligations in direct tension with litigation strategy. The question is necessary because it tests whether the adversarial framing of the engagement can legitimately suppress the fact-gathering diligence and peer-notification obligations that would unambiguously apply in a non-adversarial engineering review.

This question emerged because the municipality occupied a dual role as both litigation adversary and retaining client of a licensed professional, creating a structural situation in which the client's adversarial interest and the professional's objectivity obligation were in direct tension, and the scope-of-work instrument was the mechanism through which that tension was operationalized. The question is necessary because it asks whether ethical obligations in professional engineering engagements are exclusively personal to the licensed engineer or whether they extend upstream to the client who defines the conditions of the engagement.

This question arose because the adversarial litigation context created a structural incentive for Engineer B to function as an advocate rather than an objective reporter, and the omission of wave equation results and equipment failure data from the final report is the concrete manifestation of that incentive displacing professional objectivity obligations. The question is necessary because it forces a determination of whether the Faithful Agent Obligation in engineering ethics is a bounded or unbounded duty - if bounded by completeness requirements, the tension resolves in favor of disclosure; if unbounded, it licenses selective reporting in adversarial contexts.

This question emerged because Engineer B offered a scope-of-work justification for not consulting pile driving records while simultaneously offering an alternative justification based on disbelief in those records' reliability - a contradiction that reveals the scope defense as instrumentally deployed rather than genuinely operative, forcing the question of whether a contractual scope can ever legitimately excuse non-consultation of known, available, and material evidence. The question is structurally necessary because it tests the outer boundary of the scope-of-work defense in engineering ethics: whether it is a legitimate professional tool for managing investigation breadth or an impermissible shield against inconvenient evidence when adverse conclusions are being drawn.

This question arose because Engineer B's report was produced inside an adversarial litigation structure that created institutional pressure toward client-aligned selectivity, while the NSPE Code's objectivity and completeness norms were designed precisely to resist that pressure. The internal tension between the Faithful Agent Obligation and the Technical Facts Non-Adversarial Character principle forced the question of whether the Code resolves the conflict by categorically subordinating advocacy to objective disclosure.

This question arose because the Omission Materiality Threshold principle and the Completeness principle operate at different levels of abstraction - one is conditional and judgment-dependent, the other is categorical - and Engineer B's report exploited that gap by treating equipment failure as below the threshold without disclosing the failure at all. The burden-allocation question emerged because no entity in the adversarial structure had an unambiguous obligation to challenge Engineer B's silent materiality determination.

This question arose because deontological ethics demands that categorical duties be scope-independent - a duty of completeness either applies universally or it does not - yet litigation engineering practice routinely defines reporting scope contractually, creating a structural conflict between the universalizability requirement of Kantian ethics and the contextual reality of retained-expert engagements. The question forced an examination of whether the NSPE Code's completeness norm functions as a true categorical imperative or as a defeasible professional standard.

This question arose because virtue ethics evaluates character through the coherence and transparency of professional conduct over time, and Engineer B's shifting justifications created a pattern that is structurally incompatible with the virtue of integrity regardless of which individual explanation was technically defensible. The question emerged because the contradiction itself - independent of the underlying omission - constituted a distinct ethical event that required separate analysis under a character-based framework.

This question arose because consequentialist analysis requires aggregating harms and benefits across all affected parties - Engineer A, the municipality, and the integrity of the mediation proceeding - and Engineer B's report created divergent outcome trajectories for each stakeholder depending on whether the omitted data was structurally determinative. The question forced an examination of whether short-term client-aligned benefit to the municipality could offset the reputational, procedural, and epistemic harms distributed across the other affected parties.

This question emerged because Engineer B issued adverse professional conclusions about Engineer A's pile design while bypassing on-site representatives, contractor supervisors, and workers who had direct knowledge of the pile driving conditions - creating a structural gap between the deontological duty of due diligence and the scope-limitation defense Engineer B invoked. The question crystallizes the Toulmin contest between the warrant requiring full available-evidence consultation before adverse opinion and the rebuttal condition that a legitimately bounded engagement scope might excuse selective inquiry.

This question arose because the dynamic test equipment failure was a known, documented event that directly bore on the evidentiary weight of Engineer B's test pile results, yet it was withheld from the very decision-makers - the municipality, mediating parties, and technical community - who needed it to evaluate Engineer B's adverse conclusions. The Toulmin structure breaks down at the warrant level: the completeness obligation and the adversarial-context non-exemption principle both authorize disclosure, while no legitimate professional warrant authorizes strategic omission of material test conditions.

This question emerged because Engineer B's failure to consult available on-site witnesses created an epistemic gap at the core of his adverse conclusions - he theorized pile inadequacy without accessing the firsthand knowledge of those who observed the pile driving conditions directly. The Toulmin contest is between the warrant requiring full evidence consultation before adverse professional opinion and the rebuttal condition that a bounded scope of engagement might excuse the omission, with the counterfactual outcome question exposing the practical stakes of that contest.

This question emerged because the wave equation analysis omission sits at the intersection of methodological choice and strategic advocacy - Engineer B possessed both the data and the capability to apply a standard analytical method that would have indicated adequate pile capacity, yet he omitted it from a report used in adversarial proceedings. The Toulmin structure is contested at the warrant level between the objectivity and completeness obligation and the faithful-agent obligation, with the rebuttal condition - that adversarial context does not justify selective reporting - effectively foreclosing the faithful-agent defense and leaving the omission without legitimate professional warrant.

This question emerged because Engineer B's pattern of selective omissions, contradictory explanations, and methodological choices that consistently favored the municipality's litigation position raises the structural question of whether the engagement itself - rather than only Engineer B's conduct within it - was the source of the ethical failure. The Toulmin contest is between the warrant permitting adversarial expert engagement subject to professional standards and the rebuttal condition that when adversarial pressure demonstrably displaces objectivity, the engagement should not have been accepted - with Engineer B's actual conduct serving as the data that retrospectively validates the rebuttal.

The board concluded that omitting the equipment failure was unethical because Engineer B's adverse conclusions rested on test data whose reliability was directly compromised by that failure, and a report that presents such conclusions without disclosing the malfunction affirmatively misleads its readers about the evidentiary basis of those conclusions under II.3.a and III.3.a.

The board concluded that failing to communicate with Engineer A's representatives was unethical because an engineer issuing adverse professional conclusions about another engineer's design work is obligated under II.3.a to ground those conclusions in a complete factual inquiry, and bypassing parties with direct firsthand knowledge of the relevant conditions falls short of that standard.

The board concluded that failing to communicate with the contractor's supervisor and workers was unethical because Engineer B's adverse conclusions about pile adequacy required a factually complete investigation, and bypassing individuals with direct firsthand knowledge of the driving conditions rendered his investigation objectively incomplete under II.3.a.

The board concluded that omitting the pile driving refusal data was unethical because those records constituted the most direct available evidence bearing on the adequacy of the 19 questioned piles, and a report that reaches adverse conclusions about pile capacity while suppressing contrary driving records creates a materially false impression of the evidentiary record in violation of II.3.a and III.3.a.

The board concluded that the omission of the equipment failure was not merely an incompleteness violation but a constructive deception under III.3.a, because the silence affirmatively induced a false assumption of test reliability in any reasonable reader, and a report that draws adverse professional conclusions while suppressing the fact that its primary measurement instrument malfunctioned misrepresents the evidentiary basis of those conclusions in a manner that compounds the underlying ethical violation identified in C1.

The board concluded that Engineer B's failure to communicate with Engineer A's representatives was not a procedural lapse but a foundational evidentiary deficiency, because Code Section II.3.b requires that publicly expressed technical opinions be founded upon knowledge of the facts, and an adverse opinion about pile behavior that deliberately excludes available firsthand testimony about the conditions under which those piles were driven cannot satisfy that standard.

The board concluded that Engineer B's non-consultation of contractor supervisors and workers was not a passive omission but an active choice to advance a specific adverse theory while deliberately avoiding the most direct means of testing it, and that this pattern - forming an adverse conclusion, identifying a specific mechanism, and declining to consult those who could verify or refute it - constitutes the advocacy posture that Code Section II.3.c prohibits.

The board concluded that Engineer B's omission of wave equation analysis and pile refusal data was not a legitimate scope selection but the suppression of the primary counter-evidence to the report's central finding, because Code Section III.3.a prohibits omissions that create a false impression of the facts, and a report concluding that 19 piles are inadequate while withholding knowledge that accepted methodology applied to available records would show those same piles to be several times over-capacity creates precisely such a false impression.

The board concluded that Engineer B's conduct represents a systematic pattern of client-aligned selective reporting rather than a collection of isolated lapses, because the omission of equipment failure, the refusal to consult witnesses, the exclusion of wave equation results, and the post-report contradictory explanations form a coherent whole in which every available piece of evidence favorable to Engineer A was excluded, shifting the ethical characterization from negligence toward deliberate advocacy in violation of Code Sections II.3.c and III.1.a.

The board concluded that the scope-of-work defense fails not because scope limitations are never legitimate but because they cannot override the engineer's independent professional obligation to disclose material facts that bear directly on the validity of adverse conclusions being issued under the engineer's professional seal, and because Engineer B's own post-report acknowledgment of the pile driving records' existence and suspicious character confirms awareness that renders the scope defense structurally unavailable under Code Section II.3.a.

The board concluded that Engineer B's contradictory post-report explanations independently violated III.1.a's prohibition on distorting or altering facts because the two positions were mutually exclusive and their simultaneous issuance - without reconciliation - distorted the factual basis of the report's methodology; the board further held that the honesty obligation is not confined to the report document but extends to how an engineer accounts for his professional choices when queried, making this an independent violation regardless of whether the underlying report omissions were separately actionable.

The board concluded that Engineer B's use of a vibratory hammer and failure to replicate original driving conditions constituted an independent ethical violation - preceding and underlying the written report's omissions - because the test results were structurally incomparable to the original pile driving program, and issuing definitive adverse conclusions from such a compromised test program without disclosing the methodological departures violated both the objectivity and truthfulness requirement of II.3.a and the competent factual foundation requirement of II.3.b.

The board concluded that Engineer B's failure to communicate with Engineer A's representatives was unethical because those representatives held material firsthand knowledge directly relevant to his adverse conclusions, and bypassing them meant his opinion was founded on a selectively assembled subset of facts rather than knowledge of the facts as required by II.3.b; additionally, the resulting report created a false impression of investigative completeness in violation of III.3.a by omitting the perspective of the engineer whose work was being adversely evaluated when that perspective was readily available.

The board concluded that the ethical burden falls primarily and non-delegably on Engineer B as the licensed professional, because Code provisions II.3.c and III.3.a contain no exception for client-defined scope limitations, making the scope-of-work defense ethically impermissible; the board further held that Engineer B's available remedies - expanding the scope, prominently disclosing the limitation, or declining the engagement - were foreclosed by his choice to issue adverse conclusions while silently omitting contradictory evidence, and while the municipality's scope definition raised a secondary institutional question, it could not transfer Engineer B's professional obligations.

The board concluded that the apparent conflict between the Faithful Agent Obligation and the Completeness and Non-Selectivity Obligation is resolvable and the Code resolves it unambiguously in favor of completeness, because II.3.c's prohibition on statements inspired by the interest of other parties means the faithful agent obligation cannot justify omitting wave equation results or equipment failure disclosures to serve the municipality's litigation strategy; the board further held that the two obligations are not genuinely in conflict when properly understood, since a faithful agent in the professional engineering context is one who provides complete and objective analysis - and Engineer B's selective report ultimately disserved even the municipality by exposing its credibility to attack when the omissions were revealed.

The board concluded that a contractually defined scope of work cannot excuse Engineer B from consulting the pile driving records because the adequacy conclusion he issued was logically dependent on understanding the original driving conditions those records documented - an engineer cannot simultaneously disclaim review of the primary evidence and claim competence to draw adverse conclusions from its absence. The board further held that Code Section II.3.b's requirement that opinions be founded on knowledge of the facts, combined with Code Section III.3.a's prohibition on material omissions creating false impressions, imposed an affirmative obligation on Engineer B to either broaden the scope, qualify the opinion, or decline to issue it.

The board concluded that the internal tension in litigation engineering - where engineers are paid by one party to evaluate another's work - is not resolved by the Code permitting selective reporting, but rather by the Code requiring that professional objectivity obligations override client tactical preferences, particularly because the adversarial context is precisely where the temptation to depart from objectivity is greatest. Engineer B's report illustrated the consequences of resolving this tension incorrectly: factual findings contradicting the client's position were omitted, producing a report that was neither professionally defensible nor ultimately useful to the client whose credibility depended on the report's integrity.

The board concluded that the burden of determining materiality rests with the reporting engineer and is measured by an objective professional standard - whether a competent reviewing engineer or relying party would consider the omitted information significant - not by the engineer's subjective judgment or the client's litigation interests. Applying that standard, the board found both omissions in Engineer B's report unambiguously material: the wave equation results were the single most important piece of evidence on pile adequacy, and the equipment failure directly undermined the reliability of the test results, making Engineer B's failure to disclose either a clear violation of Code Section III.3.a.

The board concluded from a deontological perspective that Engineer B violated a categorical duty of completeness by omitting the dynamic test equipment failure, and that this violation is independent of whether the omission ultimately affected the structural conclusions about the 19 piles, because the duty to disclose is not a consequentialist obligation discharged by favorable outcomes. The board identified the core deontological harm as Engineer B substituting his own undisclosed judgment about the equipment failure's impact for the informed evaluation of the report's audience - the precise form of violation that Code Sections II.3.a and III.3.a are designed to prevent.

The board concluded from a virtue ethics perspective that Engineer B failed to demonstrate professional integrity because a virtuous engineer, when queried about investigative choices, would provide a transparent and coherent account of those choices even if it revealed limitations - not two mutually exclusive explanations that together suggest post-hoc rationalization. The board further identified Engineer B's selective reporting as a failure of intellectual courage, the virtue that would have required him to report findings contradicting the client's position precisely because his value as an expert depended on the credibility that only completeness could sustain.

The board concluded that Engineer B's selective omissions were ethically indefensible from a consequentialist perspective because the identifiable harms - reputational injury to Engineer A, distortion of the mediation record, disservice to the municipality, and erosion of expert witness integrity - substantially outweighed the sole identifiable benefit of a short-term tactical advantage that was itself negated when the omissions were exposed, confirming across all three normative frameworks that multiple code violations had occurred.

The board concluded that Engineer B breached a deontological duty of due diligence under Code Section II.3.b because the obligation to found technical opinions on knowledge of the facts is a procedural duty requiring reasonable investigative effort before issuance - not a consequentialist standard satisfied by any outcome - and Engineer B's failure to consult the primary available sources of firsthand knowledge about the very conditions his adverse conclusions addressed rendered those conclusions factually ungrounded in a manner that constituted a substantive, not merely procedural, ethical breach.

The board concluded that disclosure of the dynamic test equipment failure would have enabled the mediating parties and technical community to properly weight the test pile results, and that Engineer B's adverse conclusions about the 19 piles would almost certainly not have survived scrutiny under those conditions, because the equipment failure - combined with the other methodological departures - would have revealed a test program whose results were of limited comparability to the original pile driving and whose evidentiary foundation was compromised.

The board concluded that had Engineer B consulted Engineer A's on-site representatives and the contractor's supervisors and workers before finalizing his report, it is highly probable that he would have obtained information sufficient to either substantiate or abandon his theory about the 19 piles, and that the report's conclusions would likely have materially differed - because the witnesses he failed to consult were the primary available sources of firsthand knowledge about the very conditions his adverse conclusions addressed.

The board concluded that had Engineer B applied wave equation analysis and disclosed that the 19 questioned piles had been driven to essential refusal at capacities several multiples above design requirements, the municipality's litigation position would have been materially weakened - and that this potential outcome provides the most plausible explanation for Engineer B's selective reporting choices, because the pattern of omissions across wave equation results, equipment failure disclosure, and witness consultation is consistent with a systematic effort to produce a client-favorable report rather than a complete and objective technical assessment, in direct violation of Code Section II.3.c.

The Board concluded that Engineer B's role as a retained litigation expert did not transform him into an advocate licensed to shape his report around the client's adversarial interests; because the NSPE Code provisions requiring objective and truthful reporting, prohibiting material omissions, and forbidding statements inspired by the interests of other parties define an absolute ceiling on what client loyalty can demand, the omissions in Engineer B's report were unambiguously unethical regardless of the litigation context in which he was retained.

The Board concluded that Engineer B's first post-report explanation - that the pile driving records were outside his scope - was ethically invalid because a scope limitation cannot excuse the omission of known, available, and dispositive evidence from a report whose adverse conclusions depend on that evidence being absent; and Engineer B's second explanation - that he simply disbelieved the records - inadvertently confirmed that the records were known and considered, revealing the omission as an intentional choice rather than a jurisdictional boundary and independently establishing a violation of the honesty and non-distortion obligations.

The Board concluded that Engineer B fundamentally mischaracterized his role by treating objective technical findings - wave equation results, pile driving refusal data, and equipment failure - as adversarial positions subject to selective deployment in service of the municipality's litigation interests; because the NSPE Code establishes that technical facts belong to the record and not to the retaining party, Engineer B's selective omissions did not merely fail a completeness obligation but affirmatively misrepresented the technical reality of the situation, making objective technical disclosure over client advocacy the central and non-negotiable ethical principle of the case.

When dynamic test equipment fails during a comparative pile driving program that forms the evidentiary basis for adverse conclusions about another engineer's work, what disclosure obligation does the reporting engineer bear?

Before issuing adverse professional conclusions about another engineer's pile design in a litigation context, what fact-gathering obligations does the retained expert bear with respect to available on-site witnesses and primary records?

When pile driving records and accepted wave equation analysis directly contradict an adverse conclusion about pile adequacy, what obligation does the reporting engineer bear to disclose that contradictory evidence in the report?

When a comparative test pile driving program uses materially different equipment and procedures than the original installation, what obligation does the supervising engineer bear to ensure methodological fidelity or disclose departures that affect the validity of the comparison?

When an engineer is queried about the basis for excluding material evidence from an adverse professional report, what honesty and non-distortion obligations govern the engineer's account of those investigative choices?

When a retained litigation expert's obligation to serve the client's interests appears to conflict with the professional obligation to produce a complete and non-selective report, how should the engineer resolve that tension - and does the adversarial context of the engagement alter the applicable standard?