Today, the lack of enforcement of standards and proactive investigations is the direct cause of Taxpayer Advocacy Groups now involved in re-defining the roles of architects and engineers to become both grand jury and prosecutors- and their demands for laws regarding felonies be charged when design professionals "stamp off" on such are getting louder.
The manufacturers defined by the NJSCI Report are not being so pursued.
Is their ability to make a living considered more important than an architect's or engineer's?
The point is this:
An architect or engineer is not the creator of the scam.
Nor are they endowed with the powers to do anything about the scam.
To quote a recent California State Architect's Licensing Board Member - "Architects don't have the powers people think they do".
And he was RIGHT.
For instance: If an architect is handed a spec at the last minute by the local school official to insert, or at any point in the process, and told that this is the only product that meets the conditions because of __________, how does the architect refute it and to whom does he go?
Their bosses, involved due to kickbacks, at the School Board? Involved bosses in a Facilities Department, all the way up the chain of command to the Director???
Read the Dedication on this blog.
Please! Wake up!
What can a Licensing Board do? Unless there is wholesale stamping off on plans....
It's the duty of the Attorney Generals - political appointees with politicians to answer to - to prosecute. So where does an architect go?
As this architect found out - nowhere, with incredible damage to career and more.
So the next time a clueless taxpayer advocacy group or non-professional takes broad swipes at the profession - look out. This architect is not going to put up with it.
I as an architect have watched many good architects be suppressed under the weight of pervasive corruption, left unchecked by politicians in control.
And guess where that leads us? To corrections in our governmental system - and arrests and imprisonment for all those involved in FORCING the illegal specs.
In order to stop the scam, the scam has to be stopped at the source.
And that source is with the manufacturers who are authors in their own game of "get the client."
Why it has been done since at least the time of the New Deal with at least one of the three named in the New Jersey Report without any legal action is quite another issue - and extremely serious.
For Taxpayer Advocacy Groups who recently raged in a blogpost screaming at all architects over one architect stamping off on plans done by one manufacturer - don't put us all into that box. Most of us are not there.
Don't swipe all architects with what a few do.
