Are you on the ethics review board? Or can one speak frankly here about engineering?

You do not need a degree to be an EIT. You do not need to have studied engineering to be a PE. The CAD tech who assists in design (to the review board:"so I've been told by our competing firms") does not even need a high school diploma.

The PE who seals the plan is human. He had four projects going, they all have deadlines, and he trusts his staff to get it right. He checks as much as he can, but he doesn't have the time or the skill to check everything. He often cannot even check his own assumptions on many calculations because half his focus and career development is on project management and business development. It has not been on double checking the basis of the formulas his software has implemented.