February 2007 ISSUE
PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE & ETHICS CORNER
APEGGA members with professional practice or ethics questions are welcome to mail them to Ray Chopiuk, P.Eng., Director, Professional Practice, APEGGA, 1500 Scotia One, 10060 Jasper AV NW, Edmonton, AB T5J 4A2; fax them to 780-426-1877; or e-mail them to rchopiuk@apegga.org.
Q Why are some members reluctant to stamp their work? One recent example is a professional engineer who indicated that the firms rate would increase if it were required to stamp drawings. The individual mentioned a possible charge to stamp each document, as an alternative. Others have a history of leaving projects after months or years of work, just before the final documents are to be stamped. It is also not uncommon to find engineers who simply refuse to stamp anything, presumably out of fear of being sued.
A Stamping a professional document that an engineer (or any other member of APEGGA) has prepared or reviewed should not be considered as a function that is separate or distinct from the preparation or review of the document itself. The stamp, along with the accompanying signature and date, serves as an indication that the document was prepared by an individual who is licensed to practice engineering or geoscience.
If it can be shown that an individual prepared a document, I wouldn’t see any difference regarding the individuals professional responsibility where, in one instance, a document was stamped and in the other, it was not. In other words, members cant avoid their professional responsibility simply by not stamping their work.
As far as the desire to avoid being sued, the courts would need to decide if an individual had a lesser degree of liability by not stamping work that the individual had prepared.
Saying that there will be an extra charge for stamping a document suggests that the work represented in an unstamped document must somehow be insufficient. Such work should not be provided to someone to rely on.
A member who neglects to stamp a document is also failing to comply with the EGGP Act and its regulations, which require all final documents of a professional nature to be stamped. What constitutes final and other related matters are addressed in the Practice Standard for Authenticating Professional Documents, available on APEGGAs website.
Some members argue that particular documents that they provide aren’t final and, therefore, they don’t stamp them. That may be fine in the interim, but at some point final stamped versions of those documents must be issued if someone is expecting to rely on them.
This isn’t to suggest that incomplete preliminary documents should be stamped if they are still under development, review or discussion. Those aren’t considered final and aren’t being issued for someone to rely on.
If a document is being issued for some restricted purpose (e.g., for budget or planning considerations), it should be clearly marked as to its limitation (e.g., Not for Construction) and stamped, since it is being issued for someone to rely on for that limited purpose.
There is no reason for a client to accept unstamped final documents. The client is entitled to confirmation that a licensed individual has accepted responsibility for the work. There is also no reason for the licensed individual to not stamp his or her work, since that individual is responsible for the work, regardless.