Misconduct and unethical practice in the construction industry is not something new to

any party involved in the construction field. When such thing happened, there is always certain
individual or firm gaining advantage or reward while putting another party in disadvantage
position or force to deal with the consequences.

In most of the case, engineer involved in the project will be the people to be blamed upon,
either directly or indirectly. Due to the current unhealthy practice in a materialistic world, ethic is
no longer the sacred element that every engineer upholds anymore. Living in a competitive
modern world, everyone is trying to put themselves in a more advantageous position than their
peer in the field. Some engineer has forgotten the one fundamental component in their practice:
to hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the people that entrusted them.

One of the most common misconduct in construction is the conflict of interest. Conflict of
interest occurs when an individual or organization is involved in multiple interests, one of which
could possible influence the motivation for an act in the other. Construction project, especially
those that are huge in scale and huge amount of money/capital is required, will always involved
lots of different firms and individual. From architect and design engineer to material supplier and
subcontractor, a construction project is a combined effort from different party with different
background, each providing their specialist services and gain reward for their services. A
successful project will require endless supervising effort and good networking with different
party.

Engineer are expose to such networking task constantly, they need to make sure they
communicate with all people in a project in order to eliminate any miscommunication from
occurring which will jeopardize the progress of the project. But sometimes this kind of
networking will result in bias judgments within the project. People tend to develop a certain
degree of personal favor to people whom they spend more time with. When time to make a
professional judgment comes, there will be influence by the personal friendship with certain
supplier or subcontractor; they might ignore the fraction advantage of other competitor bidding
on the same project. This is how a conflict of interest occurred at the lowest level. Sometimes it
happen consciously or subconsciously by people who make decision, to them is just a matter of a
win-win situation where the supplier get to supply the material and the engineer done his part of
getting the material. But in the prospective view of professional engineering, this is unethical
practice because engineer in charge of a project should always put the employer or client’s
benefit as the primary concern.

Another example on conflict of interest is one that involved a particular committee and
the party that subjected to the investigation of the committee, especially on matters that deals
with failed project or foul-play suspicious case. Although the committees members are suppose
to be free from any direct or indirect relation with the latter, however there are certain cases in the
past where the member of committee was later found having interest on the outcome of the
committee investigation. Hence, the trustworthiness of the committee finding is jeopardized by
such scandalous news.

While some professional engineer might argue that not all individual with conflict of
interest will make choices or decision based on personal gain, the best way to eliminate such
unnecessary speculation is for the engineer being in that position to be withdrew from the
committee. An ethical engineer will never put him/herself in such awkward position where their
integrity will be put in to question.

Under table dealing is another common misconduct in the construction field. It is done by
having undisclosed arrangement between the parties involved without any formal or proper
regulation and such arrangement usually benefit both parties. The simplest and most direct form
of under table dealing is bribery. Bribery is defined as the practice of offering something in order
to gain an illicit advantage. Bribery can be in the form of money, luxury item, future job
arrangement, and even personal favor. Due to the influential status exhibit by some engineer, they
are bestowed with such unethical means of gaining personal benefit on the expense of practicing
ethical conduct in their job. It has become a common practice for less competitive party to use
such unlawful approach to stay ahead of stronger firm.

While some bribery goes unnoticed without any complicity, few actually cause
catastrophic consequences to a construction project. For example, a small capacity supplier is
awarded the contract to provide raw material to a large scale project. Because of the limited
experience and production capacity of this particular supplier; the delivery of the raw material
will most likely to be behind schedule or insufficient. This in turn causes the delay on the
progression of the whole project. The operation cost of a huge project can be amounted up to ten
of thousands per day or even more depending on the nature of the project. At the end of the day,
this entire problem can be eliminated if no deceptive acts were involved in the choice of selecting
the proper supplier.

In the previous example, the bribery act causes the delay of project progress. Things could
have been worst if the construction proceed on time but with material that is not adequate or vary
from the design specification. This happened a lot in the past when the less competitive supplier
have to make do with providing material that is different from the specification but because of the
bribery arrangement, these has gone unnoticed until failure of building occurred. Loses of live
and money always follow by such problem. To know that such incident is the cause of
misconduct of some individual putting their own benefit while ignore the safety of the people
who has misplaced their trust in them is horrifying. The most disturbing part of bribing in
construction is the fact that everyone know that it is happening but nothing much can be done to
stop such unethical practice.

Negligence is another form of misconduct in construction industry. The meaning of

negligence can be put simple as failure to act with the prudence that a reasonable person would
exercise under the same circumstances. Negligence is one mistake that often brush off with
excuse like too busy or careless. It is ethically unacceptable for an important profession like
engineer to avoid taking responsibility and neglect to perform services in areas of their
competence. Due to their qualification or experience in the specific technical fields, they are
responsible to give services in any checking for the feasibility of the project.