August 10, 1998
The purpose of the Iowa Board of Engineering and Land Surveying Examiners is to protect the "life, health and property of the people." The board should therefore be able to justify its actions in terms of how it is affecting the "life, health and property of the people" and discard any action that is not consistent with, or necessary for, this mission. A board of engineers should be eminently practical in its considerations, and should resist ceremony and paperwork that might be embraced by other bureaucracies. The Board of Engineering Examiners has once again revised the rules concerning the certification statement. A few years ago they added the requirement that our expiration date be included. They recently added a requirement that the page numbers certified be included. They also made the very important change that we are now "licensed" not "registered." We are now also required to include our seal or a facsimile thereof on documents that we sign. Now they are including the requirement that the wording of the certification statement be "exactly" as specified. What does all this has to do with the public health and well being? We must have been doing a grave disservice to the public for these many years, to not use the correct procedures in signing our work. Other states apparently are endangering the health and well being of their publics by requiring only a seal and a signature. Is it critical that our expiration date is well known, and published with every document we sign? This would be the case only if, when an engineer passes his expiration date without renewing, his many years of education and experience instantly dissolve, and all previous documents prepared by that engineer are changed in some way so as to now be considered suspect. Seals date back thousands of years and were used because few people knew how to write: the seal served as a signature. In more recent years most engineers knew how to write, however a seal embossed the document and some effort was required to obtain a seal, providing some added indication that the person named on the seal was responsible for the drawing. However, now a good CAD operator can produce a facsimile of a seal in a very little time. Any seal can be produced with very little cost or effort. The seal therefore no longer provides any assurance that the engineer whose seal is applied actually produced the document. Most recently, the board was displeased that many engineers altered the wording in the certification statement, so they have passed a regulation requiring that the wording be "exactly" according to their regulations. However, the fact that so many engineers changed the wording is a positive sign. This indicates that engineers have actually read what they are going to sign, and have determined that it does not strictly apply to the actual conditions they are signing under. This is further an indication that engineers care about what they sign, and that the required certification statement says more or less than what is needed. The board should consider that the variety of wordings reflect a variety of situations, and that may be a hint that the "one size fits all" certification cannot be applied. It should be asked why the board has any concern at all about the specific wording of the certification. All these items: the certification statement, the seal, and the expiration date, are mere embellishments. The only item that really matters to the protection of the public is the engineer's name and signature: it is the engineer's good name and reputation that protect the public. Any other requirement is only for the self-aggrandizement of the Board of Examiners.
Chris W. Jens, PE
|