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 acted unethically by omitting the failed test equipment from his report, the omission is compounded by the fact that the equipment failure was not merely a peripheral procedural detail but a foundational validity condition for the entire test program. A report that draws quantitative conclusions about pile capacity from dynamic test data, while silently suppressing the fact that the dynamic test equipment malfunctioned during that very program, does not merely omit a fact — it affirmatively misrepresents the evidentiary basis of its conclusions. Under code provisions requiring objective and truthful professional reports and prohibiting material omissions, the ethical violation is not simply one of incompleteness but of constructive misrepresentation: a reader of the report would reasonably assume the test instrumentation functioned correctly, and Engineer B's silence on the failure exploited that assumption. The severity of this violation is heightened because Engineer B possessed actual knowledge of the failure, meaning the omission cannot be attributed to oversight.

The Board's conclusion that Engineer B acted unethically by omitting the equipment failure does not fully address the separate and independently significant ethical problem created by Engineer B's two mutually contradictory justifications for that omission. Engineer B first claimed the pile driving records were outside his scope of work, and later claimed he simply disbelieved them. These explanations cannot both be true simultaneously: if the records were genuinely outside scope, their credibility would be irrelevant and no belief judgment would have been formed; if Engineer B formed a substantive judgment that the records were suspicious, he necessarily engaged with their content, which means the scope limitation was not the operative reason for exclusion. The inconsistency strongly suggests that the scope-of-work rationale was a post-hoc rationalization constructed to deflect scrutiny rather than a genuine professional boundary observed at the time. This pattern of shifting justification is itself an ethical violation distinct from the underlying omissions, because it involves distorting the facts of Engineer B's own investigative process when challenged — conduct directly prohibited by the code provision requiring engineers to acknowledge errors and not distort or alter the facts. The Board's conclusions, while correct, do not capture this secondary layer of ethical failure.

The Board's conclusion that Engineer B was obligated to communicate with Engineer A's representatives extends beyond a procedural courtesy requirement. Because Engineer A's on-site representatives possessed direct, first-hand knowledge of the pile driving operations — including the conditions under which the 19 disputed piles reached refusal — their testimony was the most probative available evidence for resolving the central factual dispute in Engineer B's analysis. Engineer B's decision to form and publish a conclusion that those piles were structurally deficient, without consulting the people best positioned to explain why they reached refusal at shallower depth, substituted speculation for investigation. The post-report explanation referencing the vented closure plate and air escape as a possible cause of anomalous refusal readings illustrates this precisely: Engineer B was aware of a plausible alternative technical explanation but made no effort to test it through consultation before issuing conclusions. This transforms the failure to communicate from a procedural lapse into a substantive investigative failure that directly undermined the technical reliability of the report's conclusions. The ethical obligation to gather all material facts before issuing professional conclusions is not discharged by the existence of a litigation adversary relationship; the adversarial context creates pressure to avoid inconvenient evidence, but that pressure is exactly what the objectivity requirements of the code are designed to resist.

The Board's conclusion that Engineer B was obligated to consult the contractor's supervisor and workers should be understood in the context of a broader principle: when an engineer's conclusions rest on an inference about why a physical anomaly occurred — here, why 19 piles reached refusal before predicted depth — and direct witnesses to that anomaly are available and identifiable, consulting those witnesses is not optional diligence but a minimum threshold of investigative competence. Engineer B's report implicitly advanced a theory that the 19 piles were deficient in load-bearing capacity, yet the factual predicate for that theory — that the piles failed to reach adequate depth for reasons other than genuine soil resistance — was never tested against the accounts of the people who drove them. The workers and contractor's supervisor could have provided information about soil conditions encountered, hammer behavior, and driving observations that either corroborated or refuted the suspicion about the driving records. By bypassing these sources entirely, Engineer B issued a report whose central conclusion rested on an uninvestigated assumption. This is not merely an ethical failure under the code's objectivity requirements; it also constitutes a disservice to Engineer B's own client, because a report built on an uninvestigated assumption is vulnerable to exactly the kind of challenge that Engineer A's geotechnical consultant mounted — a challenge that ultimately undermined the municipality's litigation position.

The Board's conclusion that Engineer B acted unethically by omitting the wave equation analysis showing the 19 piles met refusal raises a principle that the Board did not articulate explicitly: when an engineer's report reaches a negative conclusion about structural adequacy — particularly for a public structure — and the engineer is aware of a recognized, accepted analytical method that produces a directly contrary result, the ethical obligation to disclose that contrary result is not merely a matter of completeness but of public safety. The wave equation calculations, applied to the driving records, indicated that the 19 piles had strength several multiples over the calculated load requirements. Engineer B's suppression of this analysis meant that the report presented a one-sided picture of structural deficiency without acknowledging that a standard industry method contradicted that picture. For a dock serving the public, the consequence of a false finding of structural deficiency could include unnecessary remediation, continued litigation costs, and erosion of public confidence in the structure — while a false finding of adequacy could endanger lives. In either direction, the suppression of material contradictory evidence in a report about a public structure implicates obligations that extend beyond the litigation context and into the domain of public welfare, which the code places at the apex of an engineer's professional obligations.

Taken together, the four violations identified by the Board reveal a systemic pattern rather than a collection of isolated lapses, and that pattern points to a structural tension in the role of litigation expert that the Board's individual conclusions do not fully address. Each omission — the equipment failure, the failure to consult Engineer A's representatives, the failure to consult the contractor's workers, and the suppression of the wave equation analysis — served the same directional interest: producing a report that supported the municipality's litigation position by presenting only the evidence consistent with pile deficiency while suppressing or ignoring evidence of adequacy. The convergence of these omissions on a single outcome is difficult to attribute to coincidence or independent professional judgments. This pattern suggests that Engineer B's role as a retained litigation expert created a structural conflict between the duty of faithful service to the retaining client and the independent duty of objectivity required of all professional engineers issuing technical reports. The Board's conclusions correctly identify each violation but do not address whether the litigation expert role, as practiced here, is inherently incompatible with the objectivity obligations of the engineering code — or whether the profession requires clearer guidance on the boundaries between legitimate advocacy support and the kind of selective, client-directed analysis that Engineer B produced. The case implies that engineers accepting litigation expert retentions must affirmatively resist client advocacy pressure and that the code's objectivity requirements apply with full force regardless of the adversarial context in which the report is produced.

Engineer B's post-report admission that 'we just did not believe the driving records' constitutes a separate and distinct ethical violation beyond the omissions already identified by the Board. Substituting personal skepticism for objective engineering analysis — without consulting available witnesses, reviewing wave equation calculations, or documenting the basis for that skepticism — violates the engineer's independent obligation to ground professional opinions in verifiable fact rather than unexamined intuition. The admission reveals that Engineer B made an affirmative epistemic choice to disregard material evidence, which is categorically different from a passive omission. Under code provision II.3.a, objectivity and truthfulness require not merely avoiding false statements but actively ensuring that conclusions rest on a complete and honest assessment of available data. The decision to disbelieve a record without investigation, and then to issue conclusions as if that record did not exist, transforms a methodological shortcut into an act of intellectual dishonesty that stands independently of the reporting omissions the Board cited.

The two contradictory justifications Engineer B offered for excluding the pile driving records — first that it was outside his scope of work, and later that he simply disbelieved them — are mutually exclusive in a way that is itself ethically significant. A genuine scope-of-work limitation is a contractual boundary that exists independent of the content of the excluded material; it does not depend on whether the engineer found that material credible. The subsequent disclosure that Engineer B had in fact reviewed the records sufficiently to form a judgment about their credibility demolishes the scope-of-work defense entirely, because one cannot simultaneously claim not to have examined something and also claim to have found it suspicious. This inconsistency strongly suggests that the scope-of-work rationale was a post-hoc rationalization constructed to provide a professionally defensible explanation for what was actually an advocacy-driven decision. When an engineer's stated justification for a material omission is demonstrably unreliable, the ethical obligation under code provisions II.3.c and III.1.a is heightened: the engineer must either correct the record or acknowledge that the original justification was false. Engineer B did neither, compounding the original violation with a secondary failure of candor.

The municipality's dual role as both the retaining client and a party with a direct financial interest in the litigation outcome created a structural conflict of interest that Engineer B had an independent obligation to acknowledge, manage, and if necessary disclose. Unlike a purely private commercial dispute, the municipality is a public entity whose litigation position directly affects how public infrastructure is evaluated and maintained. Engineer B's retention by the municipality placed him in a position where his professional conclusions could be shaped — consciously or unconsciously — by the client's adversarial interest rather than by objective engineering analysis. Code provision II.3.c explicitly prohibits technical statements inspired by interested parties, and the structural relationship between Engineer B and the municipality satisfies the conditions that provision was designed to address. The ethical obligation arising from this conflict is not merely to produce an unbiased report in fact, but to affirmatively acknowledge the relationship in the report so that any reviewing authority — including a court — can assess the independence of the conclusions. Engineer B's failure to disclose this structural conflict, combined with the selective omissions in his report, suggests that the conflict was not merely unacknowledged but actively operative in shaping his conclusions.

Because the dock is a public structure whose pile foundation bears directly on public safety, Engineer B's obligations extended beyond his litigation role to encompass an independent duty to flag unresolved structural questions to an appropriate public authority. The 19 piles Engineer B identified as potentially deficient represent a live public safety concern regardless of how the litigation is resolved. Code provision III.1.b requires engineers to advise clients when a project will not be successful, but the underlying principle — that engineers bear a duty to the public that transcends their client relationship — implies a corollary obligation when the client's litigation interest may suppress safety-relevant findings. Engineer B's report, by omitting the wave equation data showing those same 19 piles had met refusal, created a misleading picture of the foundation's adequacy that could persist in the public record long after the litigation concluded. The ethical weight of this omission is amplified by the public nature of the structure: an engineer who knowingly produces an incomplete assessment of a public facility's structural adequacy, and takes no steps to ensure that the unresolved questions reach a competent authority, has subordinated the public interest to client advocacy in a manner that the NSPE code does not permit.

The tension between Engineer B's role as a faithful agent of the municipality and his independent obligation of neutrality as an expert witness cannot be resolved in favor of client advocacy when the two duties collide. The NSPE code does not create a litigation exception to the requirements of objectivity and completeness; code provision II.3.c explicitly prohibits technical statements inspired by interested parties, and that prohibition applies with equal force whether the interested party is a private corporation or a public municipality. An engineer serving as a retained litigation expert retains the full weight of professional ethical obligations and cannot discharge those obligations by pointing to the adversarial context as justification for selective disclosure. When the duties of faithful agency and expert neutrality conflict, the duty of neutrality must prevail because it is grounded in the engineer's obligation to the public and to the integrity of the technical record, whereas the duty of faithful agency is grounded in a contractual relationship that cannot override professional ethical standards. Engineer B's report demonstrates what happens when this hierarchy is inverted: the client's litigation interest displaced the engineer's obligation to produce a complete and honest technical assessment.

A contractually defined scope of work does not relieve an engineer of the ethical obligation to disclose material facts that bear directly on the validity of the conclusions in a professional report, particularly when those facts are known to the engineer at the time of reporting. The scope-of-work constraint is a legitimate tool for defining the boundaries of an investigation, but it cannot function as a license to suppress contradictory evidence that the engineer has already encountered. Code provision III.3.a prohibits statements containing material omissions that create a false impression, and that prohibition is not qualified by whether the omitted material fell within or outside the contracted scope. When Engineer B concluded that 19 piles were structurally deficient based on depth-of-penetration analysis, and simultaneously possessed knowledge that those same piles had, according to driving records, met refusal — a fact that wave equation analysis would translate into a strength several multiples over design requirements — the omission of that contradictory information from the report created precisely the kind of false impression that code provision III.3.a was designed to prevent. The scope-of-work limitation could have justified not conducting a wave equation analysis; it could not justify concealing the existence of data that would have prompted a competent reader to question the report's conclusions.

From a deontological perspective, Engineer B's omission of the dynamic test equipment failure from his report constitutes a categorical violation of the duty of complete and truthful reporting, independent of whether that omission affected the structural conclusions. The deontological analysis does not permit consequentialist escape routes: the ethical weight of the omission is not diminished by arguing that the conclusions would have been the same even with full disclosure. Code provision II.3.a imposes an unconditional obligation of objectivity and truthfulness in professional reports, and that obligation is violated the moment a material fact is knowingly excluded, regardless of outcome. The equipment failure was directly relevant to the reliability of the test data on which Engineer B's conclusions rested; a reader of the report had a right to know that the instrumentation had failed and to assess independently whether that failure compromised the results. By withholding that information, Engineer B denied the report's audience — including the court — the ability to exercise independent judgment about the evidentiary weight of his conclusions. This is a deontological violation of the first order: it treats the report's audience as a means to the client's litigation end rather than as rational agents entitled to complete information.

From a consequentialist perspective, the cumulative harm produced by Engineer B's selective omissions substantially outweighed any legitimate benefit his report provided to the municipality's litigation position. The report suppressed wave equation data, concealed equipment failure, and excluded driving records — three independent categories of evidence that collectively pointed toward the adequacy of the original foundation. The public safety implications compound the consequentialist calculus: a dock foundation that is publicly characterized as deficient based on an incomplete analysis may trigger unnecessary remediation costs, erode public confidence in the original design, and create a misleading precedent in the litigation record. Moreover, the municipality's own long-term interest was not well served by a report that could be — and apparently was — challenged on methodological grounds by Engineer A's geotechnical consultant. A complete and methodologically sound report, even if less favorable to the municipality's immediate litigation position, would have provided a more durable evidentiary foundation and avoided the reputational and professional consequences that flow from a demonstrably incomplete expert opinion. The net consequence of Engineer B's approach was to produce a report that was simultaneously harmful to the public interest, vulnerable to technical challenge, and ultimately less useful to the client it was designed to serve.

From a virtue ethics standpoint, Engineer B's dismissal of the pile driving records as 'suspicious' without consulting the contractors, workers, or Engineer A's representatives represents a failure of both intellectual honesty and epistemic humility — two virtues that are foundational to the role of an expert witness. Intellectual honesty requires that an engineer acknowledge the limits of his own knowledge and the existence of evidence that challenges his conclusions; epistemic humility requires that he recognize when his personal skepticism about a record is insufficient grounds for excluding it from analysis, particularly when the people who created that record are available and willing to be consulted. Engineer B possessed the capability to resolve his suspicion about the driving records through straightforward inquiry — the on-site representatives, contractors, and workers were available — yet he chose not to exercise that capability. This is not a failure of competence but a failure of character: the virtuous engineer in Engineer B's position would have treated the suspicious records as a prompt for deeper investigation rather than as a justification for exclusion. The virtue ethics framework also highlights the corrosive effect of Engineer B's conduct on the broader professional community: expert witnesses who substitute advocacy for objectivity undermine the epistemic authority that makes engineering expertise valuable in legal proceedings.

The counterfactual analysis of whether disclosure of the dynamic test equipment failure would have undermined the municipality's litigation strategy is highly probative of Engineer B's actual motivation for the omission. If the equipment failure was genuinely irrelevant to the conclusions — as a scope-of-work defense might imply — then disclosing it would have had no material effect on the municipality's position, and there would have been no rational advocacy-based reason to omit it. The fact that Engineer B omitted it, combined with the fact that Engineer A's geotechnical consultant identified it as a significant methodological flaw, strongly suggests that Engineer B recognized the disclosure would be damaging to the municipality's case and made a deliberate choice to suppress it. This inference is consistent with the pattern of selective omissions throughout the report: each omitted item — the equipment failure, the wave equation data, the driving records showing refusal — pointed in the same direction, toward the adequacy of the original foundation. The probability that three independent categories of exculpatory evidence were all coincidentally excluded by a scope-of-work limitation, rather than by a systematic advocacy bias, is vanishingly small. The counterfactual therefore illuminates not only the motivation for the omission but the degree to which Engineer B's report was structured around the client's litigation interest rather than around objective engineering analysis.

The counterfactual inquiry into whether consultation with Engineer A's representatives and the contractor's workers would have resolved the suspicion about the pile driving records reveals a critical asymmetry in Engineer B's investigative approach: he was willing to act on his suspicion by excluding the records from his analysis, but unwilling to test that suspicion through the most direct and available means. Had Engineer B consulted the on-site representatives and workers, one of two outcomes would have followed. Either the consultation would have corroborated the driving records — in which case Engineer B's conclusions about the 19 piles would have required fundamental revision — or it would have surfaced legitimate concerns about record accuracy that could have been documented and disclosed in the report. In either case, the resulting report would have been more complete, more defensible, and more consistent with the engineer's professional obligations. The fact that Engineer B chose neither path — neither accepting the records nor investigating his doubts about them — and instead simply excluded them without disclosure, suggests that the investigative omission was not an oversight but a strategic choice. This counterfactual therefore supports the Board's conclusion that the failure to consult was an ethical violation, and extends that conclusion by demonstrating that the omission was not merely negligent but structurally consistent with a pattern of advocacy-driven evidence selection.

The counterfactual question of whether methodologically consistent test conditions would have confirmed rather than undermined the original foundation's adequacy carries profound ethical implications for the weight that must be assigned to methodological consistency in expert testing. Engineer B's test program deviated from the original driving conditions in at least three documented respects: use of a vibratory hammer not used in original driving, failure to drive test piles to equivalent penetration depth, and pre-record hammer drops that Engineer A's geotechnical consultant testified would have broken the pile bond and undervalued skin friction. Each of these deviations systematically biased the test results in the direction of lower measured pile capacity. If replicating the original conditions would have produced results confirming the foundation's adequacy, then Engineer B's methodological choices did not merely introduce uncertainty — they produced a directionally biased outcome that served the municipality's litigation interest. This possibility does not require proof of deliberate manipulation; it is sufficient that Engineer B designed or permitted a test program that was structurally incapable of fairly evaluating the original foundation, and then issued conclusions based on that program without disclosing its limitations. The ethical obligation of methodological consistency in expert testing is therefore not merely a technical standard but a safeguard against the use of engineering expertise as an instrument of advocacy.

The counterfactual question of whether Engineer B should have declined the municipality's retention on conflict-of-interest grounds illuminates an important threshold obligation that precedes all of the specific violations the Board identified: the obligation to assess, before accepting an engagement, whether the adversarial litigation context is compatible with the engineer's ability to fulfill his professional obligations. Had Engineer B declined the retention on the grounds that the municipality's status as both client and litigation party created an irreconcilable tension with his duty to produce an objective expert report, the public interest would have been better served in two respects. First, the misleading report would not have entered the litigation record. Second, the refusal would have signaled to the municipality — and to the profession — that engineering expertise is not available as a litigation instrument when the conditions of the engagement preclude genuine objectivity. The NSPE code does not explicitly require engineers to decline retentions that create structural conflicts, but the obligations imposed by code provisions II.3.a and II.3.c are only satisfiable if the engineer enters the engagement with a genuine commitment to objectivity. When the structural conditions of an engagement make that commitment implausible — as they did here, given the municipality's dual role — the ethical engineer's obligation is to either restructure the engagement to preserve independence or decline it entirely. Engineer B's failure to exercise that threshold judgment set the conditions for every subsequent violation the Board identified.

The tension between Engineer B's role as a faithful litigation agent and his independent obligation of investigative completeness was never genuinely resolved in this case — it was simply collapsed in favor of the client. A faithful agent relationship in litigation permits an engineer to advocate for a client's position through legitimate technical means, but it does not permit the engineer to suppress material contradictory evidence or to decline fact-gathering that might undermine the client's case. Engineer B treated these two obligations as though they were in irreconcilable conflict, and resolved that conflict by abandoning investigative completeness entirely. The case teaches that when client loyalty and investigative completeness appear to conflict, the ethical resolution is not to choose one over the other but to recognize that a technically incomplete report cannot constitute legitimate client service in the first place. An expert report that omits the failed dynamic test equipment, the wave equation calculations, and the driving records showing refusal is not a stronger advocacy document — it is a professionally defective one that ultimately disserves the client by exposing the litigation position to impeachment. The correct resolution of this tension was available to Engineer B: conduct a complete investigation, disclose all material facts including those unfavorable to the municipality, and then offer a reasoned professional opinion. That path would have honored both obligations simultaneously.

The scope-of-work limitation and the obligation of investigative completeness represent a principle tension that this case resolves decisively against the scope limitation as an ethical shield. Engineer B invoked the contractually defined scope of work as a justification for excluding the pile driving records, but this justification is ethically untenable for two compounding reasons. First, a contractual scope of work can define the boundaries of compensated services but cannot relieve an engineer of the obligation to disclose material facts that bear directly on the validity of the conclusions in a professional report. When Engineer B concluded that 19 piles were structurally deficient, that conclusion was inseparable from the pile driving records showing those same piles had met refusal — omitting the records did not merely narrow the scope of the report, it rendered the conclusions affirmatively misleading. Second, the scope-of-work justification was subsequently abandoned by Engineer B himself, who admitted post-report that the real reason for excluding the records was disbelief rather than contractual limitation. This sequence reveals that the scope limitation was not a genuine professional boundary but a post-hoc rationalization, and the case teaches that when an engineer's stated justification for a material omission is demonstrably inconsistent with the engineer's own later explanation, the ethical violation is compounded: the original omission is unethical, and the pretextual justification for it constitutes a separate failure of intellectual honesty.

The interaction between methodological consistency and objective reporting reveals a structural ethical principle that this case makes explicit: an engineer who designs and supervises a test program that deviates materially from the original conditions being evaluated acquires a heightened, not diminished, obligation to disclose those deviations in the resulting report. Engineer B's test program departed from the original pile driving conditions in at least three documented respects — use of a vibratory hammer not used in the original driving, pre-record hammer drops that likely broke the pile bond and undervalued skin friction, and failure of the dynamic test equipment. Each deviation independently undermined the comparability of the test results to the original 90-pile installation. Taken together, they meant that Engineer B's conclusions about the 19 disputed piles rested on a methodologically compromised foundation. The principle of methodological consistency does not merely require that an engineer attempt to replicate original conditions; it requires that when replication fails or is not achieved, the engineer disclose the nature and likely effect of those deviations so that the report's conclusions can be properly weighted by the reader. By omitting all three categories of deviation from his report, Engineer B violated both methodological consistency and objective completeness simultaneously, and the case teaches that these two principles are not independent — methodological failures that are concealed become objective reporting failures, and the ethical weight of the concealment is proportional to the materiality of the deviation to the report's conclusions.

The substitution of personal skepticism for objective engineering analysis — as revealed by Engineer B's post-report statement that 'we just did not believe the driving records' — represents a distinct ethical violation that sits at the intersection of the principles of intellectual honesty, investigative diligence, and objectivity. Professional skepticism is a legitimate and necessary component of engineering judgment, but it carries an obligation: when an engineer disbelieves a material body of evidence, the ethical response is to investigate the basis for that disbelief, consult the parties with direct knowledge of the evidence, and either substantiate the skepticism with technical reasoning or revise the conclusion accordingly. Engineer B did none of these things. He neither consulted Engineer A's on-site representatives, nor the contractor's workers, nor the contractor's supervisor — all of whom were available and could have corroborated or refuted the driving records. The case teaches that unverified personal disbelief of material evidence, when used as the operative basis for excluding that evidence from a professional report without disclosure, is not a defensible exercise of engineering judgment — it is a form of adversarial data selection masquerading as professional discretion. The principle of investigative diligence requires that skepticism be tested, not merely asserted, and the principle of intellectual honesty requires that when skepticism cannot be substantiated through investigation, the engineer must acknowledge the contradictory evidence and explain the basis for discounting it rather than silently omitting it.

The public safety dimension of this case reveals an unresolved tension between Engineer B's litigation role and the broader public interest obligation that attaches whenever an engineer's conclusions bear on the structural adequacy of a public facility. The dock is a public structure, and Engineer B's report concluded that 19 of its 90 supporting piles were structurally deficient. That conclusion, if accurate, would implicate public safety directly. If inaccurate — as the omitted wave equation calculations and driving records suggesting refusal would indicate — then Engineer B's report created a false impression of structural deficiency that could itself generate unnecessary public concern or costly remediation. In either case, the public interest was at stake in a way that transcended the municipality's litigation position. The case teaches that the adversarial litigation context creates the greatest pressure toward selective disclosure precisely when the public interest obligation is strongest, and that the NSPE code provisions requiring objective and truthful reporting are not suspended by the litigation context — they are, if anything, more demanding in that context because the consequences of a biased expert report extend beyond the immediate parties to the proceeding. Engineer B's failure to resolve this tension in favor of public safety and complete disclosure, rather than in favor of the municipality's litigation strategy, represents the deepest ethical failure in the case: the subordination of the public interest obligation to client advocacy in a context where public safety was directly implicated.

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?

Did Engineer B's post-report explanation that 'we just did not believe the driving records' constitute an admission that he substituted personal skepticism for objective engineering analysis, and does that admission itself constitute a separate ethical violation distinct from the omissions in the report?

Given that Engineer B gave two contradictory justifications for excluding the pile driving records — first that it was outside his scope of work, and later that he simply disbelieved them — does the inconsistency between these explanations suggest that the scope-of-work limitation was a post-hoc rationalization rather than a genuine professional boundary, and what ethical obligations arise when an engineer's stated justification for an omission is itself demonstrably unreliable?

To what extent does the municipality's role as the retaining client create a structural conflict of interest that Engineer B had an independent obligation to disclose or manage, and should the NSPE code require expert witnesses retained by litigation parties to affirmatively acknowledge that conflict in their reports?

Because the dock is a public structure and the adequacy of its pile foundation bears directly on public safety, did Engineer B have an obligation that transcended his litigation role to flag the unresolved structural questions to a public authority or regulatory body, independent of what his client the municipality wished him to report?

Does the principle of Engineer B Faithful Agent Limits in Litigation conflict with Engineer B Litigation Neutrality Violation — that is, can an engineer serving as a retained litigation expert simultaneously fulfill a duty of zealous service to the retaining client and an independent duty of neutrality and completeness, and when those duties collide, which must yield?

Does Engineer B Scope Limitation Non-Disclosure conflict with Engineer B Investigative Completeness Failure — specifically, if a contractually defined scope of work genuinely excluded review of pile driving records, does that contractual constraint relieve Engineer B of the ethical obligation to gather all material facts before issuing conclusions, or does the ethical duty of investigative completeness override a client-imposed scope limitation when material evidence is knowingly excluded?

Does Engineer B Methodological Consistency Failure conflict with Engineer B Client Service Disservice — that is, by designing a test program that failed to replicate original driving conditions (vibratory hammer use, pre-record hammer drops, equipment failure), did Engineer B simultaneously undermine the methodological integrity his client needed to prevail and violate his independent obligation to produce technically sound results, and does serving the client's litigation interest ever justify methodological shortcuts that compromise the reliability of the engineer's own conclusions?

Does Engineer B Intellectual Honesty in Expert Report conflict with Engineer B Litigation Neutrality Breach when the engineer's retaining party is also a public municipality — meaning that the obligation to produce an honest, complete report for the benefit of the public interest may be even stronger than in purely private litigation, yet the adversarial litigation context creates the greatest pressure toward selective disclosure?

From a deontological perspective, did Engineer B fulfill a categorical duty of complete and truthful reporting by omitting the failed dynamic test equipment from his report, regardless of whether that omission ultimately affected the structural conclusions?

From a consequentialist perspective, did the cumulative harm produced by Engineer B's selective omissions — including suppression of wave equation data, equipment failure, and driving records — outweigh any legitimate benefit his report provided to the municipality's litigation position, particularly given the public safety implications of a potentially misevaluated dock foundation?

From a virtue ethics standpoint, did Engineer B demonstrate the professional virtues of intellectual honesty and epistemic humility when he dismissed the pile driving records as 'suspicious' without consulting the contractors, workers, or Engineer A's representatives who could have corroborated or refuted that suspicion?

From a deontological perspective, does the existence of a narrowly defined scope of work ever discharge an engineer's categorical duty to disclose material facts — such as test equipment failure or contradictory driving records — that bear directly on the validity of the conclusions in a professional report submitted in a legal proceeding?

If Engineer B had disclosed the dynamic test equipment failure in his report, would the municipality's litigation strategy have been materially undermined, and does the answer to that question illuminate whether Engineer B's omission was a product of client advocacy bias rather than a genuine scope-of-work limitation?

Had Engineer B consulted Engineer A's on-site representatives and the contractor's workers before issuing his report, is it plausible that the suspicion about the pile driving records would have been resolved, and would a revised report incorporating that information have changed the conclusion that 19 piles were structurally deficient?

If Engineer B had replicated the original pile driving conditions — using the same hammer type, driving the test piles to equivalent penetration depth, and not dropping the hammer before commencing blow count records — would the test results have confirmed rather than undermined the adequacy of the original 90-pile foundation, and what does that possibility imply about the ethical weight of methodological consistency in expert testing?

If Engineer B had declined the municipality's retention on the grounds that the adversarial litigation context created an irreconcilable conflict with his obligation to produce an objective expert report, would that refusal have better served the public interest and the integrity of the engineering profession than the biased report he ultimately issued?

Because the foundation design is the technical origin point that the contractor later challenged, fulfilling professional competence and relying on geotechnical expert recommendation matters because it establishes the defensible basis for all downstream dispute resolution, including the mediation and test pile program that the claim eventually triggered.

The settlement resolves the contractor claim that construction completion set in motion, and fulfilling responsible resolution of professional disputes matters here because the agreement directly opens the path to expert testimony and the test pile program, meaning a poorly handled settlement would have corrupted the entire subsequent technical record.

Expert testimony given by the municipality feeds directly into the commissioning of the test pile program, so fulfilling client advocacy in a legal proceeding matters because the quality and credibility of that testimony shapes whether the technical investigation that follows is properly scoped and taken seriously by all parties.

The test pile program produces the strength gain confirmation that could vindicate the original design, but it also creates the conditions under which Engineer B later commits irregularities and issues a deficient report, so fulfilling due diligence in the technical dispute matters because a rigorously commissioned program is the only safeguard against those downstream integrity failures.

Engineer A commissions the independent observer directly after the test pile program begins, and fulfilling professional due diligence and protection of the technical record matters because the observer is positioned to detect the non-representative test execution and pile record exclusion that Engineer B later uses to produce a deficient report, making the observer the last practical check before ethics violations are found.

Because the flawed test execution directly caused observable irregularities that undermined the validity of the entire pile program, violating professional competence and diligent fact-gathering meant that the downstream report and any decisions based on it rested on a corrupted technical foundation rather than reliable data.

Concealing the equipment failure stripped stakeholders of information necessary to evaluate test validity, and because this omission fed directly into the ethics violation finding, the breach of complete and accurate reporting caused concrete harm to the integrity of the proceedings the municipality had commissioned.

Skipping consultation with relevant parties meant that critical perspectives and records were never gathered, and because this omission contributed directly to the deficient report, the violation of fact-gathering diligence and professional competence had a traceable causal role in producing a report that misled rather than informed.

Excluding pile records from the report directly caused the deficient report to be issued, meaning the violation of the obligation to include all relevant information was not merely procedural but materially shaped the output that the municipality and other parties relied upon to resolve a contested claim.

Issuing the deficient report was the convergence point of all prior omissions and failures, and because it produced both an ethics violation finding and a contradictory explanation from Engineer B, the violations of honesty, completeness, and client service obligations carried real consequences for the credibility of the entire expert process the municipality had initiated.

Because the deficient report directly caused both the ethics violation finding and the need for a contradictory explanation, Engineer B's violation of professional honesty and accurate reporting obligations matters enormously here, since a misleading post-report explanation compounds the original documentation failures and undermines any corrective accountability that the downstream ethics process was meant to provide.

The question arose because Engineer B occupied the dual role of test program supervisor and litigation expert for the municipality, which created pressure to frame findings favorably for the client. When the equipment failure was later raised through the Independent Geotechnical Observer and the Contradictory Post-Report Explanation, it became clear that Engineer B had the information, had the capability to disclose it, and chose not to, making the omission appear deliberate rather than incidental to scope.

The question arose because Engineer B occupied two roles simultaneously, a technical investigator bound by fact-gathering diligence and an expert retained to defend the municipality, and those roles carry conflicting norms about whose knowledge should be sought. The omission of any contact with Engineer A's side left open whether Engineer B's investigation was technically incomplete or simply adversarially bounded, and that ambiguity is what makes the ethical status of the non-communication genuinely contestable.

This question arose because Engineer B occupied the role of litigation expert, a role that carries a heightened duty of objectivity and completeness beyond ordinary client service, and the contractor supervisor and workers represented the most direct available source of factual information about original construction conditions. The failure to consult them, combined with the issuance of a report that reached conclusions about those same construction conditions, created a direct conflict between the scope limitation Engineer B invoked and the investigative completeness standard that expert reporting demands.

The question arose because Engineer B drew affirmative conclusions about the adequacy of the 19 piles without acknowledging that driving records already on file indicated those piles had met refusal, making the omission appear selective rather than incidental. The adversarial context of his retention by the municipality sharpened the concern, because a neutral expert is expected to surface contradictory evidence rather than confine the analysis to data that supports the client's position.

The question emerged because Engineer B's verbal explanation after the report was issued created a second evidentiary event that exposed the reasoning process behind the original omissions, forcing a determination of whether undisclosed subjective disbelief constitutes a violation independent of the omissions it produced. The gap between what the report said and what Engineer B later admitted he believed is the structural source of the question, because it reveals that the report's silence on the driving records was not an oversight but a deliberate credibility judgment that was hidden from the reader.

This question emerged because the sequential inconsistency between Engineer B's two explanations created observable evidence that at least one of them was not the true basis for the omission, which forced the question of what ethical obligations attach when an engineer's stated justification is itself demonstrably unreliable. The contradiction transformed what might have been a routine scope dispute into a question about professional honesty, because an engineer who gives shifting reasons for an omission has undermined the credibility of both reasons and left no transparent account of why relevant evidence was excluded from an expert report.

This question emerged because Engineer B occupied two roles simultaneously, a paid agent of the municipality and a purportedly objective technical expert, and the NSPE code at the time did not explicitly require engineers in that dual position to affirmatively disclose the structural conflict in their reports. The deficient report, the pile record exclusion, and the eventual ethics finding made visible a gap between what the code assumed about expert witness independence and what the adversarial retention structure actually produced.

The question arose because Engineer B's role as a municipality litigation expert placed him inside an adversarial legal structure that normally limits disclosure obligations to the client and the court, yet the subject of the dispute was a public dock whose pile foundation remained structurally unresolved after a deficient test program. The collision between the bounded faithful agent role and the engineer's independent public safety obligation created genuine uncertainty about whether the litigation context could lawfully contain what was also a public risk disclosure question.

This question emerged because Engineer B occupied two roles whose governing warrants point in opposite directions: the faithful agent role authorizes selective emphasis in service of the client, while the expert witness role prohibits selective emphasis in service of technical truth. The specific data of pile record exclusion, equipment failure non-disclosure, and a deficient report issued in a litigation context forced the question of which warrant controls when the two collide, because Engineer B's actual conduct satisfied one warrant only by violating the other.

This question arose because Engineer B simultaneously invoked a contractual scope limitation to justify not reviewing pile driving records and issued conclusions about pile foundation adequacy that those same records would directly inform. The tension between honoring client-defined scope and maintaining the investigative completeness required for any credible expert conclusion created a genuine conflict that neither warrant could resolve without contesting the other.

This question arose because Engineer B occupied two roles simultaneously, serving as a faithful agent to the municipality and as an independent technical authority whose conclusions had to be methodologically defensible. The test program deviations collapsed those two roles into a single contradiction, forcing the question of whether litigation service and technical integrity can coexist when the engineer controls both the test design and the reporting of its limitations.

The question emerged because Engineer B's retention by a municipality collapsed two normally separate roles into one engagement: the role of expert serving a client in adversarial litigation and the role of technical advisor whose work affects public infrastructure safety. The Deficient Report Issuance and Pile Record Exclusion actions made the tension visible, because those actions could be explained either as ordinary adversarial scope management or as a breach of the heightened honesty obligation that attaches when the client is a public body responsible for a 90-pile dock foundation affecting public safety.

This question emerged because Engineer B's omission of the failed dynamic test equipment created a direct collision between the deontological principle that truthful reporting is an unconditional duty and the professional norm that engineers may legitimately bound their reports to commissioned scope. The question forces a determination of whether the categorical character of the honesty duty survives a scope limitation rebuttal, which is precisely the condition that makes the ethical status of the omission genuinely uncertain rather than obvious.

This question arose because Engineer B occupied two roles whose obligations point in opposite directions: a retained litigation expert owes zealous service to the client, but an engineer issuing a technical report on a public structure owes completeness and neutrality to all affected parties. The cumulative pattern of omissions, each individually defensible as scope limitation, collectively produced a report that could not be tested against the full technical record, forcing a consequentialist audit of whether the litigation benefit to the municipality outweighed the risk transferred to the public through a potentially misevaluated dock foundation.

The question arose because Engineer B's characterization of the records as suspicious without consulting available witnesses created observable tension between what a virtuous expert would do when encountering anomalous evidence and what an expert operating under a client-defined scope is permitted to do. The subsequent contradictory post-report explanation compounded the concern by suggesting the dismissal was not a neutral scope decision but a conclusion reached without the epistemic groundwork that intellectual honesty and humility require.

The question emerged because Engineer B performed actions that are factually incompatible with a complete and honest report, specifically omitting equipment failure and contradictory pile driving records, and then offered a scope-of-work defense that, if accepted, would allow a contracted boundary to override a categorical professional duty. The deontological framing sharpens the question because Kantian ethics does not recognize consequentialist or contractual exceptions to duties grounded in honesty and non-deception, making the scope defense structurally suspect and forcing explicit analysis of whether any contractual limitation can discharge a categorical obligation.

This question arose because the same omission can be read as either a reasonable scope boundary or as selective suppression of damaging technical data, and the answer turns on whether the equipment failure was causally connected to the conclusions Engineer B chose to include. The question forces a determination of whether the litigation context shaped what Engineer B treated as within scope, which is precisely the condition under which the Expert Witness Neutrality Obligation overrides the Faithful Agent role.

The question arose because Engineer B's decision to omit stakeholder consultation created an unresolved gap between his suspicion about the pile driving records and any factual basis for confirming or dismissing that suspicion. The competing warrants governing investigative completeness and scope limitation left open whether the omission was a professional failure that distorted the conclusion or a permissible boundary that left the conclusion intact regardless of what consultation might have revealed.

This question arose because Engineer B supervised a test program that departed from the original driving conditions in multiple documented ways, then issued conclusions about foundation adequacy without acknowledging whether those departures affected the results. The question forces examination of whether methodological consistency is a procedural formality or a substantive ethical requirement, because the answer determines whether Engineer B's findings were a legitimate technical contribution or a misleading artifact of a flawed test design.

This question arose because Engineer B did not decline the retention and then produced a report that violated multiple objectivity obligations, which forces a retrospective evaluation of whether the engagement itself was the root cause of the ethical failure. The question asks whether a refusal at the outset would have better served the public interest and professional integrity than participation followed by a biased report, and it emerges precisely because the data show that the adversarial engagement structure and the resulting Client Defense Bias State together produced outcomes that the Expert Witness Neutrality Obligation and the Adversarial Data Selection Prohibition Obligation both condemn.

Because Engineer B knew the dynamic test equipment had malfunctioned and nonetheless issued a report drawing pile capacity conclusions from that equipment's data without any mention of the failure, the board found that the omission rendered the report incomplete and objectively misleading under P1 and P6, constituting an ethical violation regardless of whether the structural conclusions were ultimately correct.

Because Engineer B issued conclusions about the adequacy of a foundation designed and supervised by Engineer A without making any contact with Engineer A's representatives, the board found that he failed his basic obligation of investigative diligence, since those representatives were available and held information that could have confirmed or refuted the basis for his conclusions.

Because Engineer B dismissed the pile driving records as suspicious and issued conclusions about pile adequacy without speaking to the contractor's supervisor or workers who had direct knowledge of the original driving, the board found that he failed his investigative completeness obligation, since those sources were available and their accounts were material to the credibility of the records he rejected.

Because the driving records showed that the 19 questioned piles had met refusal, and because Engineer B knew this and chose not to mention it in his report, the board found that the omission violated his obligation to present all material facts bearing on his conclusions, since a reader of the report had no way to know that contradictory evidence existed and had been set aside.

Because Engineer B knew the dynamic test equipment had failed and issued a report drawing pile capacity conclusions from that equipment's data without any mention of the failure, the board found that the omission was not merely incomplete but constituted constructive misrepresentation, since Engineer B's actual knowledge meant the silence was a deliberate choice that allowed readers to rely on conclusions built on a foundation the engineer himself knew was compromised.

Because Engineer B's two stated reasons for excluding the pile driving records cannot both be true at the same time, and because the credibility-based explanation emerged only under challenge, the board concluded that the scope-of-work rationale was a post-hoc rationalization rather than a genuine professional boundary, making the shifting justification itself a violation of the obligation not to distort the facts of one's own conduct.

Because Engineer A's representatives held the most probative available evidence on why the 19 piles reached refusal at shallower depth, and because Engineer B was aware of at least one alternative technical explanation he never tested, the board concluded that the failure to consult was not a procedural lapse but a substantive investigative failure that directly undermined the technical reliability of the report's conclusions.

Because Engineer B's report implicitly advanced a theory about why 19 piles reached refusal early without testing that theory against the accounts of the people who drove them, and because those people were identifiable and accessible, the board concluded that bypassing these sources entirely meant the report's central conclusion rested on an uninvestigated assumption, which is both an ethical failure and a disservice to the client whose litigation position the report was meant to support.

Because Engineer B knew the wave equation analysis contradicted his deficiency conclusion and suppressed it entirely, and because the structure served the public, the board concluded that the omission was not a permissible exercise of professional judgment about which evidence to emphasize but a violation of the obligation to produce objective and complete reports, with the public safety dimension elevating the ethical weight of the disclosure obligation above what it would carry in a purely private context.

Because all four violations pointed in the same direction and that direction aligned with the retaining client's litigation interest, the board concluded that the pattern reflects a systemic subordination of objectivity to client advocacy rather than a collection of isolated lapses, and that this pattern exposes a structural tension in the litigation expert role that the code's objectivity requirements must govern with full force regardless of the adversarial context.

Because Engineer B admitted he had reviewed the driving records sufficiently to distrust them, yet took no investigative steps to test that distrust and issued conclusions as if the records were absent, the board found that the post-report admission revealed an independent epistemic violation distinct from the reporting omissions already cited. The admission transformed what might have appeared to be a passive gap in the report into evidence of a deliberate and undisclosed choice to substitute personal skepticism for objective analysis.

Because Engineer B's scope-of-work defense required that he had not examined the records, and his credibility-based defense required that he had examined them closely enough to distrust them, the board found the two explanations could not both be true. The board concluded that the scope-of-work rationale was constructed after the fact to provide a professionally defensible cover for what was actually an advocacy-driven exclusion, and that the failure to correct this false explanation compounded the original omission with a secondary candor violation.

Because the municipality both retained Engineer B and stood to benefit financially from conclusions favorable to its litigation position, the board found that the structural conditions for a conflict of interest under II.3.c were satisfied regardless of whether Engineer B consciously intended to favor his client. The board further found that the combination of undisclosed conflict and selective omissions in the report provided affirmative evidence that the conflict was not merely theoretical but operative in shaping the conclusions Engineer B issued.

Because the dock serves the public and the 19 piles Engineer B flagged as potentially deficient represent a live safety concern, the board found that Engineer B's obligations extended beyond the litigation engagement to include an independent duty to ensure that unresolved structural questions reached a competent authority. The omission of the wave equation data, which showed those same piles had met refusal, compounded this failure by leaving a misleading and incomplete structural record in place after the litigation concluded.

Because Engineer B's report omitted multiple categories of material evidence that each happened to cut against the municipality's litigation position, the board found that the pattern of omissions could not be attributed to coincidence or neutral professional judgment. The board concluded that the duty of expert neutrality must yield to the duty of faithful agency only when the two are genuinely compatible, and that Engineer B's report demonstrated what results when the hierarchy is inverted and client advocacy displaces the obligation to produce a complete and honest technical assessment.

Because Engineer B already possessed the driving records showing refusal when he issued his conclusions about pile deficiency, the board found that the scope-of-work boundary could not excuse the omission. The omission created a false impression of analytical completeness in violation of III.3.a, not because Engineer B was required to perform wave equation analysis, but because he was required to disclose that contradictory data existed.

Because Engineer B knew the test equipment had failed and omitted that fact from a report submitted in a legal proceeding, the board found a categorical violation of II.3.a. The deontological analysis turned on the act of knowing exclusion itself, not on whether the structural conclusions were ultimately correct, because the report audience including the court was denied the ability to independently evaluate the evidentiary weight of the data.

Because three separate bodies of contradictory evidence were all excluded and the affected structure was a public dock, the board found that the consequentialist calculus was decisively negative. The report harmed the public interest, proved vulnerable to technical challenge, and ultimately failed to serve even the client's durable litigation needs, producing net harm across every relevant dimension.

Because Engineer B had direct access to the contractors and workers who created the driving records and chose not to consult them before labeling the records suspicious, the board found a failure of intellectual honesty and epistemic humility rather than a mere procedural lapse. The inconsistency between his two stated justifications further indicated that neither represented a genuine professional boundary, reinforcing the conclusion that the exclusion reflected advocacy bias rather than reasoned judgment.

Because every omitted item pointed toward foundation adequacy and because disclosing the equipment failure would have cost the municipality nothing if it were truly irrelevant, the board found that the scope-of-work justification was a post-hoc rationalization rather than a genuine professional boundary. The systematic alignment of all omissions with the client's litigation interest, taken together with the contradictory post-report explanation, supported the inference that Engineer B structured his report around advocacy rather than objective engineering analysis.

Because Engineer B identified the pile driving records as suspicious and then excluded them without consulting the workers and representatives who were present during construction and available to him, the board found that the omission was not a passive oversight but a choice to act on unverified doubt, and that choice violated the investigative completeness and intellectual honesty obligations that govern expert reporting.

Because the three documented deviations from original driving conditions each pushed measured pile capacity downward and the report disclosed none of them, the board concluded that Engineer B either designed or permitted a test program that was structurally incapable of fairly evaluating the original foundation, and that issuing conclusions from such a program without disclosure violated the methodological consistency and objectivity obligations that define the ethical floor for expert testing.

Because the municipality's dual role as client and litigation party created a structural condition that made genuine objectivity implausible from the outset, and because Engineer B neither restructured the engagement nor declined it, the board found that the threshold judgment to accept the retention without safeguards set the conditions for every subsequent violation, and that the ethical obligation to assess engagement compatibility with professional duties precedes and conditions all other obligations in the engagement.

Because Engineer B collapsed the tension between client loyalty and investigative completeness entirely in favor of the client by omitting the equipment failure, wave equation data, and driving records, the board found that he misunderstood the nature of the faithful agent obligation in litigation, which permits advocacy through legitimate technical means but does not permit suppression of material contradictory evidence, and that the correct resolution of the tension was available to him through a complete report offering a reasoned professional opinion.

Because Engineer B first cited scope of work and then admitted he simply disbelieved the driving records, the board found that the scope limitation was a post-hoc rationalization rather than a genuine professional boundary, and that this sequence compounded the original ethical violation by adding a separate failure of intellectual honesty, because an engineer whose stated justification for a material omission is demonstrably inconsistent with his own later explanation has not merely omitted evidence but has misrepresented the basis for doing so.

Because Engineer B's test program deviated from original conditions in three documented and material respects, and because his report conclusions about the 19 piles depended on comparability to those original conditions, the board concluded that omitting all three deviations simultaneously violated methodological consistency and objective completeness as linked rather than independent duties. The concealment of methodological failures converted them into objective reporting failures, and the ethical weight of that concealment was proportional to how directly each deviation undermined the report's central conclusions.

Because Engineer B admitted after the fact that he simply did not believe the driving records, and because he made no effort to test that belief by consulting any of the available parties with direct knowledge, the board concluded that his exclusion of the records was adversarial data selection rather than professional judgment. The inconsistency between his scope-of-work justification and his later admission of disbelief further indicated that the scope rationale was constructed after the fact, which itself constituted a separate violation of intellectual honesty under III.1.a.

Because the dock was a public structure and Engineer B's conclusions about 19 deficient piles bore directly on public safety, the board concluded that his failure to disclose omitted evidence and methodological deviations represented the deepest ethical failure in the case, the subordination of the public interest obligation to client advocacy at precisely the moment when the public interest obligation was strongest. The adversarial litigation context, rather than reducing Engineer B's disclosure duties, intensified them because the potential harm from a biased expert report on a public structure extended beyond the municipality and the contractor to the public relying on the dock's structural integrity.

Should Engineer B disclose in the report that dynamic test equipment failed, that pile driving records were not reviewed, and that the scope excluded material data sources, or present conclusions without flagging these limitations?

Should Engineer B apply consistent analytical methodology to all available evidence, including data contradicting the retaining party's position, or confine analysis to data supporting the client's litigation theory?

Should Engineer B present a complete and methodologically consistent technical report including all findings, or limit the report to data and methods that support the retaining party's position?

Should Engineer B disclose contradictory evidence and scope limitations in the expert report, or withhold that information to protect the retaining party's litigation position?