I typed my opinion of the Idaho AG and deleted it. It's not worth getting banned...
I contacted the state board about this and laid out the details in an email with attachments. They replied to me quickly but were clueless as to what could be done when one is a licensed PE in a specific discipline. Despite numerous back and forths, they still had no answer.
It seems like the board in Washington takes these things seriously. You can look up the Winter 2023 journal and see that they fined an engineer $5,000 for working outside his area of expertise, as well as a written agreement limiting his practice. Another had to agree to have all his systems reviewed for two years. And there are investigations of surveyors as well.
Regarding different types of engineering, in WA, there are PE's and SE's. The stamp is the same for all engineers except for structural. That said, it is certainly against RCW 18.43.105(10) to perform services outside your area of expertise.
RCW 18.43.105(10) Committing any other act, or failing to act, which act or failure are customarily regarded as being contrary to the accepted professional conduct or standard generally expected of those practicing professional engineering or land surveying.
And this law is clearly defined in the WAC196-27A-020: Fundamental canons and guidelines for professional conduct and practice.
WAC196-27A-020(2)(e) Registrants must be qualified by education or experience in the technical field of engineering or land surveying applicable to services performed.
Checked out the most recent list of violations announced by the Kansas State Board of Technical Professions (Engineering, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Land Surveying and Geology).
The first three listed were of the PS variety, then one PE and one non-licensed business doing engineering. All were assessed fines plus costs of investigation. In every case the fine was inadequate to dissuade future misbehavior, in my opinion.
Our board wouldn't proceed with this complaint. They are focused on clamping down on registrants. They also will look into un-registrants that offer surveying services for pay. In this case the contractor wasn't advertising surveying services, his focus was building.
What he did was weird, possibly fraud because he was trying to fool the inspectors, but since he called the OP to "make it legal" then I really doubt our board would jump into this one. I would certainly have a talk with him to not do this again. But it's more on the agency that is doing the inspection than the surveying board. The complaint should go to them, if anyone.
It's often up to us to police the profession. Just a couple of weeks ago I had a similar situation. A un-licensed person was doing some work for one of my clients. I came down pretty hard on my client and to get it cleaned up I went to the field and fixed it all. With all the technology out there available, this will continue to happen, you could file complaints against every GIS department, planner, utility, developer, Google, ect. if you want to get really picky.
I would pick my battles when going to the board.
Costs of investigation and prosecution can start in the tens of thousands. Defending yourself can run to six figures in a contested case...
Property owners commonly stake the corners they perceive as theirs. Granted, they don't often use capped iron rods to do it - they usually use fence posts and such - but that is immaterial. So there is no unlicensed practice here.
The crime, if any, would be in fraudulently representing to the inspector that the corner stakes had been set by a PLS. On the other hand, if the inspector merely observed the stakes and jumped to an unwarranted conclusion ...... good luck getting a conviction on that.
Years ago when I first started my company I showed up to a subdivision project and the Client/contractor had put in a bunch of fences. I asked him if he had been sure to not disturb the property corners. His answer was "we pulled them and put them back in when the fencing was done". I had to reset every monument for about 10 lots!
I've probably told this story before, but when I was a young pup my PC & I were charged with checking (post construction) monuments another crew had set on a new commercial subdivision. All the exterior monuments, along the back of walk, were there, but they were randomly of by a tenth or two. Norm could be a salty old guy, and I got to hear his displeasure with the work of the other PC as I reset them all. That was until about 3/4 of the way in when I found our mons suspiciously leaning over the newly installed irrigation line. Apparently the irrigation contractor had just butted the ditch-witch up against the back of walk pulling up the mons and then resetting them as they went along. The actually did a pretty good job. Anyway, as I was resetting the last monument, at around 1630 on a Friday, I ended up driving the iron rod through one of their main lines. It looked like Old Faithfull when Norm said pack it up, they can fix it on Monday. I think he figured turnaround was fair play.
