As part of its role in providing guidance and encouraging the harmonisation of standards, FIG offers this model code. Professional surveyors recognise that their ethical responsibilities extend to the public, to their clients and employers, to their peers and to their employees. Accordingly they acknowledge the need for integrity, independence, care and competence, and a sense of duty. FIG recommends that surveyors and associations of surveyors adopt the following ethical principles and model codes of professional conduct or, where appropriate, adapt them to local values and customs. The first duty of surveyors is normally to their clients or employers but as professionals they also have a duty to the public.
Surveyors are fact finders and providers of opinions and advice.
It is important that they are diligent, competent, impartial and of unquestionable integrity in ensuring that the information they provide is true and complete and that the opinions and advice that they give are of the highest quality. The work of surveyors has cumulative and long term effects on future generations. Many of the functions of surveyors, even those performed for private clients, are by their nature functions that have a lasting impact on society. Most information becomes public information at some point in time and may be used for purposes other than those for which it was initially intended. The information recorded by early surveyors and explorers has, for example, subsequently been used for the expansion of geographical knowledge and for land development.