Professional Ethics, Liability and Consultant Practice
What the exam tests
This domain tests the consultant’s legal and ethical duties: competence, duty of care, conflict of interest, confidentiality, signing and stamping, independent certification, liability and professional indemnity. It also covers the engineer’s role under FIDIC-style contracts.
Core rules
- Practise only within your competence. If a task exceeds your experience, obtain specialist review rather than signing unsupervised work.
- Duty of care runs to the client and to those foreseeably affected. Reasonable skill and care is the standard; perfection is not.
- Disclose conflicts of interest early and in writing. A paid trip, gift or shareholding linked to a supplier can compromise independent judgment.
- Keep client information confidential and use it only for the project.
- Sign and stamp only drawings and reports you have personally checked or directly supervised. Stamping another person’s unchecked work is misconduct.
- Certification of payment or completion must be independent and evidence-based. Do not certify to please the contractor or the client.
- Liability may arise in contract, tort or under the Engineers Syndicate’s professional rules. Professional indemnity insurance is a risk tool, not a substitute for competence.
- Under FIDIC forms, the Engineer determines fairly, not as the employer’s agent.
Worked example
A contractor offers you an all-expenses-paid conference trip shortly before a variation valuation. The ethical response is to decline the trip or, if attendance is genuinely technical, pay your own costs and disclose the offer to the client. Then value the variation from measured records and the contract, and document the independence of the decision. The test is not whether you feel influenced; it is whether a reasonable observer would see a conflict.
Traps
Stamping work you did not supervise; hiding a design error instead of notifying the client and proposing a fix; accepting gifts from bidders; certifying unverified quantities; acting as both designer and undisclosed contractor; assuming insurance resolves an ethical breach.
Key points
- Work only within your competence and obtain specialist review when needed.
- Disclose conflicts of interest early and in writing.
- Sign and stamp only work you have checked or supervised.
- Certify payment on evidence, independently of commercial pressure.
- Under FIDIC, the Engineer determines fairly and independently.