October 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 AVE NW, Edmonton AB T5J 4A2; fax them to 780-426-1877; or e-mail them to rchopiuk@apegga.org.
Q Does APEGGA have any regulations or opinions on whether the copies of drawings issued for construction (IFC) need to be signed and stamped (including P.Eng., permit-to-practice and IFC stamps) or whether they can be just straight copies of the original set of drawings, which are fully authenticated including the IFC stamp?
When we issue drawings for construction, we stamp them with the P.Eng. and permit-to-practice stamps and sign them. We then make copies of the original and then stamp all issued drawings with the IFC stamp. We are trying to figure out if we can save ourselves some work by not having to stamp all the drawings with the IFC stamp, but rather copy it just like the P.Eng. and permit-to-practice stamps.
A Let’s first turn to APEGGA’s Practice Standard for Authenticating Professional Documents, available at www.apegga.org/pdf/Guidelines/26.pdf. The stand-ard notes in Section 3.4 that “all originals and all copies of final documents shall include a signed and dated professional stamp or a facsimile thereof.”
The intent of this interpretation of the regulations is that a copy of an original drawing that has been stamped with a professional member’s stamp and that has been signed and dated by the member is as acceptable as the original drawing. In other words, a member can keep the fully authenticated original and provide copies to a client, just as you’ve indicated you are doing, but you should recognize that a client would be entitled to ask for the original.
You won’t find anything in the regulations concerning an IFC stamp, however, since it is not a regulatory requirement. Presumably it is something that your firm has created as part of its process for issuing documents. Nonetheless, if a copy of a professional member’s stamp is acceptable (and it is), then a copy of an IFC stamp would also be acceptable.
The practice standard notes that if, for example, a drawing is issued for some purpose other than construction, it should be marked accordingly — Not for Construction, For Budget Purposes Only, etc. The important point is that one should be able to distinguish between drawings that can be used for construction and those that can’t.
Some firms include Issued for Construction as part of their drawing title
blocks, for instance.
Copies of such drawings would not typically feature a means to further verify
that they were, indeed, acceptable for construction.
You’ve said that you stamp your firm’s drawings with the APEGGA permit stamp. The regulations no longer require documents to be stamped with the permit stamp. Rather, they require that documents of a professional nature (drawings, for example) simply show a permit holder’s permit number. You may still use the permit stamp as a means of putting the permit number on your drawings, however.
lternatively, you could include the permit number as part
of a drawing title block, a report title page, etc.
Many firms still use the permit stamp as a means of internal quality control,
requiring the firm’s Responsible Member to also sign the permit stamp.
That process is quite acceptable.
If you do continue to use the permit stamp, it would be a good idea if you also continued to sign it as you have been doing. If you simply used the stamp as a means of putting the permit number on a document and didn’t sign the permit stamp, you would most likely be questioned by a client or a building authority as to why it wasn’t signed, even though a signed permit stamp is no longer a regulatory requirement.