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Honest curiosity: is it fraud (in the US) to claim that you are a member of a profession that you are not? (I am not saying that is what he intended to do here)

by bgun 9y ago

Honest curiosity: is it fraud (in the US) to claim that you are a member of a profession that you are not? (I am not saying that is what he intended to do here). For example, if someone owes me money, is it illegal for me to send them a letter, in which I purport to be a lawyer?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Disgone 9y ago
Engineering isn't exactly the same, but I worked IT at an architecture firm and workers there were not legally allowed to call themselves "Architect" without being licensed.
phoenixProgram 9y ago
I am a lawyer and you are practicing law without a license. Fine is $500. Send me yer moneys plz kthxbai --skittles the kitten
bmh_ca 9y ago
There are several facts that affect whether the consequence of claiming to have a professional qualification is regulatory or criminal (being two branches of "illegal"), including (but not limited to), in no particular order: 1. Who you send it to 2. The purpose of the communication 3. The consequences of the communication 4. Whether it is inter- or intra-state 5. What profession it is There are other questions that can factor in, but the general rule is: don't lie. Lying of any form for personal gain is generally a species of fraud, but pretending to have a professional qualification – even without gain – can also incur consequences. It's not limited to professional qualifications; some places still observe the crime of jactitation, which is pretending to be married.
- peterwwillis 9y ago
  To simplify this: Any title which is protected and governed by law makes it illegal for you to claim the title without being licensed to do so. "Engineer" is one of those titles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_en...
  - muninn_ 9y ago
    From your link: "However, it is important to make a distinction between a "graduate engineer" and a "professional engineer" or "licensed engineer." A "graduate engineer" is anyone holding a degree in engineering from an accredited four-year university program, but is not licensed to practice or offer services to the public. Unlicensed engineers usually work as employees for a company, or as professors in engineering colleges, where they are governed under the industrial exemption clause. Some states, such as Ohio and New Jersey, prohibit the use of the term "engineer" by an unlicensed person unless it is part of the internal classification of their employer." So you don't need a license to call yourself an engineer. What this effectively does is permits engineers to perform engineering tasks and be called engineers in their line of work, without having to complete the examinations and all of that jazz. Otherwise, the entire system makes 0 sense. Furthermore, this demonstrates that you may call yourself an engineer if you have graduated from engineering college as you are under granted the title "graduate engineer", and thus can use engineer for shorthand, just as "engineers in training" and "professional engineers" may call themselves engineers for short. I doubt they want to always have to call themselves professional engineers or engineers in training or face a silly fine. Though I do fully support requiring licensure for some engineering related work. Basically, if you can fuck something up that can cost lives (aviation, bridges, buildings, etc...), you should have a license. Screwing up some code or mixing industrial chemicals normally doesn't fall into that category, though. If it does then yes you should be licensed.
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      It's unwise to rely on a Wikipedia for legal analysis; at best you should treat it as a good starting point for your more detailed research.
      - muninn_ 9y ago
        I was quoting OP's link and not providing legal analysis - just demonstrating faulty reasoning provided by OP. Meanwhile I'll keep on being an engineer all the live long day :)
- derefr 9y ago
  A more interesting question, to me: would it be more or less dangerous to create a fictional person, who "is" a lawyer—or a fictional LLP, run by such a person†—and then send a letter written "as" them, representing you? By sending such a letter, I'm not claiming to be a lawyer, right? But then, what am I doing? † The law was at least smart enough here to require a partnership structure. Imagine if your fictional lawyer could be "employed by" a real shell corporation!
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > By sending such a letter, I'm not claiming to be a lawyer, right? Wrong. The author of the letter (you) is falsely claiming to be a lawyer. You are also falsely claiming other things, which may or may not have additional consequences.
    - derefr 9y ago
      I don't see how. I'm not falsely claiming that I'm a lawyer. I'm falsely claiming that someone else is a lawyer—a fictional person. (I write claims in the voices of fictional people all the time; I'm a novelist.) Is it because I would presumably be writing the letter with a first-person-viewpoint prose style? If so, then would it change anything if I just wrote a letter as myself, saying that I would contact my named, fictitious lawyer and have them draw up a suit against the recipient? Or, on a completely different (ridiculous) tangent: if a program generates an email claiming that it's a lawyer (not from a template written by a person; from genuine black-box deep-learning text generation, hooked straight up to an email client, without foreknowledge or expectation from the author that this would be the result), has the author of the program committed a crime? I would assume the author in that case more parallels the owner of an animal that did something that would have been a crime if a human did it, but is very blurry without the presumed mens rea humanity brings to the table.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        You are writing a letter that purports to be written by a lawyer; you are pretending to be a lawyer that happens to have a different name than your actual name. That is both pretending to be a lawyer, and pretending other false things. Consider if you change the communication medium from written to oral: if walk up to someone and claim a different name than is actually yours, claim to be a lawyer representing someone else (who you identify with your actual name), and then issue some demands, etc., it's pretty clear that you are claiming to be a lawyer. Changing the medium from oral communication to written doesn't change the essence at all.
Taniwha 9y ago
Whether or not you're allowed to call yourself an engineer varies from state to state - as a very rough rule it's more likely to be regulated on the East coast than the West (Oregon excepted as we see here)
LeifCarrotson 9y ago
There are a number of professions in the US where yes, this is somewhat regulated. I can think of a few: 1. Medical doctors 2. Certified Public Accountants 3. Lawyers 4. Professional Engineers 5. Realtors Many other professions and certifying agencies will claim that a certification is necessary to practice, and that you should pay them for the privilege, but these are some of the few that are legally protected. You need a "Professional Engineer" certificate from the NSPE to sign off on certain documents. But note that these certain documents are only used in certain fields, like civil engineering. This certification is not required to be (or to claim to be) a software engineer, electronics engineer, mechanical engineer, product engineer, chemical engineer, etc. For example, I've taken many engineering courses, I have a bachelor's of science in engineering degree, and I practice engineering day-to-day without being a professional engineer. In college, perhaps 5% of my graduating class took the PE exam? And now, few of my coworkers, customers, or suppliers are professional engineers - The two individuals that I can think of transferred into the domain out of civil engineering. The electronics engineer in the article mistakenly stumbled into the territory of civil engineers who are very, very protective of their licensure, and they overreacted IMO. I don't dispute that if he'd claimed to be an NSPE-licensed Professional Engineer, and signed off on documents which are legally required to be approved by a PE, that he'd be deserving of the punishments associated with this fraud (which are much steeper than $500). But the NSPE does not own the generic term "engineer".
- sib 9y ago
  To be specific, a "Realtor" is not a profession; it is a trademarked term. To be a "Realtor" one must be a member of the National Association of Realtors, which is a trade association. It is possible to be a "real estate agent" (the profession) without being a Realtor. There are licensing requirements, which vary by state, to be a real estate agent.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 9y ago
It varies by state; in California the unauthorized practice of law is a crime. Perhaps predictably, the people complaining about this feel that it's a form of rent-seeking by incumbents, but none of them have bothered to consider the flip side of the equation which is that bad actors who falsely hold themselves out as licensed professionals can hurt would-be clients in two ways: by directly exploiting them for the cost of services which they are not licensed to provide, and by jeopardizing their longer-term interests in a way that might severely impact them in the future. Obviously this gentleman is not running around trying to scam Oregonians into paying for cut-price engineering work. But publicly asserting that you are licensed to practice a profession without actually being so, especially when licensure is generally easy to obtain, creates the potential for public misunderstanding. The point of the fine is not to impose a serious financial penalty (hence the token amount of %500) but to draw the public's attention to the fact that anyone holding themselves out as an engineer needs to be licensed within the jurisdiction in which they are practicing - and practicing on your own behalf is still practicing and indeed widely considered by professionals as a kind of marketing. Considering that the annual fee to practice as an engineer in Oregon is only $75, and that engineering is well established as a profession, I don't think his complaints have a whole lot of merit. Last time I looked engineers are required to take ethics classes as part of their education, and in many jurisdictions keeping ones certification up requires a certain number of hours spent in continuing education each year, same as in the medical and legal professions. If you're not actively practicing your profession then you have, legally speaking, retired and should not present yourself as being currently licensed.
- dnautics 9y ago
  In this particular case, the defendant is licensed as an engineer.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    An odd statement to make, considering that his defense was that he doesn't need to be licensed engineer to call himself an engineer. Where is he licensed? Why is he not licensed in Oregon, despite having been timely notified, without penalty, of the requirement to do so if he wished to claim that title? Why did he agree to abide by this requirement then break his agreement within months?
jdietrich 9y ago
In most states, it's illegal to braid hair without a license. http://braidingfreedom.com/ http://braidingfreedom.com/
- crocowhile 9y ago
  land of the free market my ass
jack9 9y ago
> is it fraud (in the US) to claim that you are a member of a profession that you are not? Architect, Lawyer and Medical Doctor, for sure.

by bgun 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Disgone 9y ago

Engineering isn't exactly the same, but I worked IT at an architecture firm and workers there were not legally allowed to call themselves "Architect" without being licensed.

phoenixProgram 9y ago

I am a lawyer and you are practicing law without a license. Fine is $500. Send me yer moneys plz kthxbai --skittles the kitten

bmh_ca 9y ago

There are several facts that affect whether the consequence of claiming to have a professional qualification is regulatory or criminal (being two branches of "illegal"), including (but not limited to), in no particular order: 1. Who you send it to 2. The purpose of the communication 3. The consequences of the communication 4. Whether it is inter- or intra-state 5. What profession it is There are other questions that can factor in, but the general rule is: don't lie. Lying of any form for personal gain is generally a species of fraud, but pretending to have a professional qualification – even without gain – can also incur consequences. It's not limited to professional qualifications; some places still observe the crime of jactitation, which is pretending to be married.

peterwwillis 9y ago
To simplify this: Any title which is protected and governed by law makes it illegal for you to claim the title without being licensed to do so. "Engineer" is one of those titles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_en...
- muninn_ 9y ago
  From your link: "However, it is important to make a distinction between a "graduate engineer" and a "professional engineer" or "licensed engineer." A "graduate engineer" is anyone holding a degree in engineering from an accredited four-year university program, but is not licensed to practice or offer services to the public. Unlicensed engineers usually work as employees for a company, or as professors in engineering colleges, where they are governed under the industrial exemption clause. Some states, such as Ohio and New Jersey, prohibit the use of the term "engineer" by an unlicensed person unless it is part of the internal classification of their employer." So you don't need a license to call yourself an engineer. What this effectively does is permits engineers to perform engineering tasks and be called engineers in their line of work, without having to complete the examinations and all of that jazz. Otherwise, the entire system makes 0 sense. Furthermore, this demonstrates that you may call yourself an engineer if you have graduated from engineering college as you are under granted the title "graduate engineer", and thus can use engineer for shorthand, just as "engineers in training" and "professional engineers" may call themselves engineers for short. I doubt they want to always have to call themselves professional engineers or engineers in training or face a silly fine. Though I do fully support requiring licensure for some engineering related work. Basically, if you can fuck something up that can cost lives (aviation, bridges, buildings, etc...), you should have a license. Screwing up some code or mixing industrial chemicals normally doesn't fall into that category, though. If it does then yes you should be licensed.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    It's unwise to rely on a Wikipedia for legal analysis; at best you should treat it as a good starting point for your more detailed research.
    - muninn_ 9y ago
      I was quoting OP's link and not providing legal analysis - just demonstrating faulty reasoning provided by OP. Meanwhile I'll keep on being an engineer all the live long day :)
derefr 9y ago
A more interesting question, to me: would it be more or less dangerous to create a fictional person, who "is" a lawyer—or a fictional LLP, run by such a person†—and then send a letter written "as" them, representing you? By sending such a letter, I'm not claiming to be a lawyer, right? But then, what am I doing? † The law was at least smart enough here to require a partnership structure. Imagine if your fictional lawyer could be "employed by" a real shell corporation!
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > By sending such a letter, I'm not claiming to be a lawyer, right? Wrong. The author of the letter (you) is falsely claiming to be a lawyer. You are also falsely claiming other things, which may or may not have additional consequences.
  - derefr 9y ago
    I don't see how. I'm not falsely claiming that I'm a lawyer. I'm falsely claiming that someone else is a lawyer—a fictional person. (I write claims in the voices of fictional people all the time; I'm a novelist.) Is it because I would presumably be writing the letter with a first-person-viewpoint prose style? If so, then would it change anything if I just wrote a letter as myself, saying that I would contact my named, fictitious lawyer and have them draw up a suit against the recipient? Or, on a completely different (ridiculous) tangent: if a program generates an email claiming that it's a lawyer (not from a template written by a person; from genuine black-box deep-learning text generation, hooked straight up to an email client, without foreknowledge or expectation from the author that this would be the result), has the author of the program committed a crime? I would assume the author in that case more parallels the owner of an animal that did something that would have been a crime if a human did it, but is very blurry without the presumed mens rea humanity brings to the table.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      You are writing a letter that purports to be written by a lawyer; you are pretending to be a lawyer that happens to have a different name than your actual name. That is both pretending to be a lawyer, and pretending other false things. Consider if you change the communication medium from written to oral: if walk up to someone and claim a different name than is actually yours, claim to be a lawyer representing someone else (who you identify with your actual name), and then issue some demands, etc., it's pretty clear that you are claiming to be a lawyer. Changing the medium from oral communication to written doesn't change the essence at all.

Taniwha 9y ago

Whether or not you're allowed to call yourself an engineer varies from state to state - as a very rough rule it's more likely to be regulated on the East coast than the West (Oregon excepted as we see here)

LeifCarrotson 9y ago

There are a number of professions in the US where yes, this is somewhat regulated. I can think of a few: 1. Medical doctors 2. Certified Public Accountants 3. Lawyers 4. Professional Engineers 5. Realtors Many other professions and certifying agencies will claim that a certification is necessary to practice, and that you should pay them for the privilege, but these are some of the few that are legally protected. You need a "Professional Engineer" certificate from the NSPE to sign off on certain documents. But note that these certain documents are only used in certain fields, like civil engineering. This certification is not required to be (or to claim to be) a software engineer, electronics engineer, mechanical engineer, product engineer, chemical engineer, etc. For example, I've taken many engineering courses, I have a bachelor's of science in engineering degree, and I practice engineering day-to-day without being a professional engineer. In college, perhaps 5% of my graduating class took the PE exam? And now, few of my coworkers, customers, or suppliers are professional engineers - The two individuals that I can think of transferred into the domain out of civil engineering. The electronics engineer in the article mistakenly stumbled into the territory of civil engineers who are very, very protective of their licensure, and they overreacted IMO. I don't dispute that if he'd claimed to be an NSPE-licensed Professional Engineer, and signed off on documents which are legally required to be approved by a PE, that he'd be deserving of the punishments associated with this fraud (which are much steeper than $500). But the NSPE does not own the generic term "engineer".

sib 9y ago
To be specific, a "Realtor" is not a profession; it is a trademarked term. To be a "Realtor" one must be a member of the National Association of Realtors, which is a trade association. It is possible to be a "real estate agent" (the profession) without being a Realtor. There are licensing requirements, which vary by state, to be a real estate agent.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

anigbrowl 9y ago

It varies by state; in California the unauthorized practice of law is a crime. Perhaps predictably, the people complaining about this feel that it's a form of rent-seeking by incumbents, but none of them have bothered to consider the flip side of the equation which is that bad actors who falsely hold themselves out as licensed professionals can hurt would-be clients in two ways: by directly exploiting them for the cost of services which they are not licensed to provide, and by jeopardizing their longer-term interests in a way that might severely impact them in the future. Obviously this gentleman is not running around trying to scam Oregonians into paying for cut-price engineering work. But publicly asserting that you are licensed to practice a profession without actually being so, especially when licensure is generally easy to obtain, creates the potential for public misunderstanding. The point of the fine is not to impose a serious financial penalty (hence the token amount of %500) but to draw the public's attention to the fact that anyone holding themselves out as an engineer needs to be licensed within the jurisdiction in which they are practicing - and practicing on your own behalf is still practicing and indeed widely considered by professionals as a kind of marketing. Considering that the annual fee to practice as an engineer in Oregon is only $75, and that engineering is well established as a profession, I don't think his complaints have a whole lot of merit. Last time I looked engineers are required to take ethics classes as part of their education, and in many jurisdictions keeping ones certification up requires a certain number of hours spent in continuing education each year, same as in the medical and legal professions. If you're not actively practicing your profession then you have, legally speaking, retired and should not present yourself as being currently licensed.

dnautics 9y ago
In this particular case, the defendant is licensed as an engineer.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  An odd statement to make, considering that his defense was that he doesn't need to be licensed engineer to call himself an engineer. Where is he licensed? Why is he not licensed in Oregon, despite having been timely notified, without penalty, of the requirement to do so if he wished to claim that title? Why did he agree to abide by this requirement then break his agreement within months?

jdietrich 9y ago

In most states, it's illegal to braid hair without a license. http://braidingfreedom.com/ http://braidingfreedom.com/

crocowhile 9y ago
land of the free market my ass

jack9 9y ago

> is it fraud (in the US) to claim that you are a member of a profession that you are not? Architect, Lawyer and Medical Doctor, for sure.