Engineer sentenced for falsifying hundreds of Yilan bridge inspections

Taipei, Dec. 5 (CNA) A former civil engineering professor has been sentenced to two years in jail for forgery after he was found to have lied about sending qualified personnel to conduct over 500 bridge inspections in Yilan County beginning in 2018.

In a verdict released Thursday, the Yilan District Court said the falsified inspections were connected to Wan Qiao Feng Engineering Technology Consultant, a company founded by former Chien Hsin University of Science and Technology professor Chen Ming-cheng (陳明正) and his ex-student, Chang Tsai-chen (張綵宸).

In 2018, the company signed a NT$11.24 million (US$346,732) contract with the Yilan County government to conduct safety inspections on bridges on Yilan's county and rural highways, it said.

The court said Chen had submitted to the county the information of 11 employees who were qualified to carry out the inspections, as specified in their contractor agreement.

Due to labor shortages, however, Chen ultimately dispatched 10 other unqualified individuals to make inspections, and then falsely reported them as having been carried out by qualified employees in the government's bridge information management system, the verdict said.

In total, the company submitted falsified data for the inspection of 541 bridges in eight Yilan townships, according to the court.

In its verdict, the court said that as civil engineering PhDs, both Chen and Chang understood the dangers of sending unqualified individuals to inspect bridges.

They nevertheless chose to do so, endangering public safety, and then continued to deny wrongdoing and showed a lack of remorse after being caught, the court said.

On those grounds, the court said, it found Chen and Chang guilty of forgery and sentenced them to two years and one year and 10 months in prison, respectively.

The verdict can be appealed.

Meanwhile, the Yilan County Transportation Department said in a statement that it has demanded financial compensation from Chen's company, which it has already replaced with another qualified contractor.

Separately, Chen Ming-cheng also led a team from Chien Hsin University to inspect Yilan's Nanfang'ao Bridge in 2016, three years before the bridge collapsed on Oct. 1, 2019, killing six people and injuring 12. He and the team were not found to be criminally liable for the collapse.