I recently became aware that a particular government agency uses a member of a private business to recommend projects for federal funds. This person, at a competing engineering firm, travels around to potential project sites and performs a basic analysis to help determine, via a recommendation to the government agency, which communities should receive the federal funds. The potential project sites tend to already have an engineering firm associated with them.
While, he may be very professional, this seems like a conflict of interest to me because he is in a position to recommend projects that his company would benefit from.
Since graduating I have come across this situation twice. The previous time, a person at the firm I worked for before had an engineer that personally over saw the allocating of government funds to private companies for engineering research and projects (our company received 95% of the funds and in disgust several people left and started a separate firm - where I work now).
So, now I’m curious – is this a common occurrence in engineering?
Is this how “no bid” contracts get awarded?
And finally, is it a violation of engineering ethics?
Your engineering society almost certainly has a code of ethics (I know IEEE does) and likely an ethics office. You might check with them. It seems suspicious to me. also check your company’s conflict of interest guidelines, though those usually refer to personal, not corporate, conflicts of interest.
This type of freelance consultant work will always be problematic.
The expertise required to carry out such a role will very often pay better in the private sector, and the result is that there will always be this potential conflict of interest.
CE has a code of ethics, but it appears to be that it is a bit subjective - like it leaves holes that allow such things to happen without violating the code.
And, the company I work for is so small that we do not have an ethics clause (as I said we split from the company we believed was violating the code).
Personally, I believe that an outside professional, such as a Professor, should work with government agencies rather than private companies that have something personal to gain… anyway.
The problem here is that he is in a position to recommend his own company in this situation. Are you sure that his company is not excluded given that he is in this position. Some parts of the federal government have strong anti-conflict of interest guidelines (we won’t discuss what happens when you get high enough here.) NSF, for instance, does not allow you to review the proposal of anybody you’ve ever written a paper with.
I have worked with faculty, and both professors and companies get a lot out of working together, especially in engineering. I can imagine potential conflicts of interest (like steering research results paid for by the government to a particular company first) but rarely have seen it happen.