Most of structural analyses are concerned with the deformation and stress in a body subjected to external loads. In many fields, however, the interpretation of inverse problems is needed to determine surface tractions or internal stresses from measured displacements. In this study, the inverse processes by using the boundary element method are formulated for the evaluation of boundary tractions from displacements measured on a remote surface. Small errors in measured displacements often result in a substantial loss of accuracy of an inverse system. Numerical results show that the error in reconstructed tractions by using the inverse boundary element methods is sensitive to measurement location and noise.