Draft version 1.7 beta — Revised October 30, 2026

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Dishonest invoicing

A topic page linked from Chapter 4 § 5, Examples of Reported Violations of Enforceable Ethics Codes.

Definition

The term "invoicing" was included without explanation in ASBOG's list of ethical issues that were included in their task-analysis surveys in 2010 and 2015.^1-3. According to Black's Law Dictionary,⁴ an invoice is "an itemized list of goods or services furnishhed by a seller to a buyer, usually specifyin the price and terms of sale; a bill of costs."

Here, invoicing is understood as a catch-all term for all sorts of issues involving charges for professional geoscience services. In the AAPG Code of Ethics,⁵ there is a broad requirement to abide by "business ethics," which might include conventional matters like creating and abiding by fee schedules that are consistent with market standards and norms, using generally accepted accounting principles, and so forth.

Anyone who has spent a day around first-graders will understand that "fairness" is a fundamental moral concept that they all understand. Behavioral experiments with capuchin monkeys by Frans de Waal and Sarah Brosnan indicated that these primates also have an intrinsic sense of fairness and inequity, demonstrated in a widely viewed TED talk video.^6-7 Fairness is a virtue (if not also an obligation) in financial dealings with clients, reducing the likelihood of acrimonious or litigious disputes over billing.

A case recollection. I recall a story I once heard of a university faculty member who entered into a contract with a private company to collect and synthesize background information on a geological matter of commercial interest to the company. They settled on a compensation rate of hundreds of dollars per day for his expertise, a daily expense allowance, and a flexible completion date. As soon as the ink was dry on the agreement, the professor tasked a minimum-wage work-study student with the library research, then wrote a brief summary and had the department secretary type it and the extensive bibliography into a digital product for him to submit to the company. The university, unaware of the outside contract, paid for the student and secretarial labor without reimbursement, while the professor collected his usual salary and accrued many days of expert fees in exchange for perhaps an afternoon of his own work on the project. When this later became known to his colleagues, it was broadly considered unethical by his peers.

The company had paid for many days of expert attention to a project, but had received far less in fact. "Charge as much as the market will bear" might be one way to approach billing arrangements, but so is "charge a fair rate for an honest day's work." Which approach would be considered fair by the clients who are paying the bills? Which would you prefer to defend if you faced an ethics tribunal or a hostile opposing attorney regarding your business practices?

ASBOG included "invoicing" as one of the 13 ethical issues in its Task Analysis surveys in 2010 and 2015, each of which was completed by a few thousand respondents—professional geoscientists and academics in the United States and Canada.^1-3 The results of those surveys indicated that "invoicing" was considered a somewhat serious problem. (The response might have been muted because the term's intended meaning was unclear.)

Relevant provisions in geoethics codes

AAPG – § 1c.; AEG – § 2.2.

Code Abbreviations

AAPG — American Association of Petroleum Geologists, AAPG Code of Ethics (2024), Link to current document

Notes and References

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