Why does the "ifort -v" command spawn a process to gcc

I noticed that when issuing the command ifort -v it then launches another process for gcc.  Is that to be expected or somehow tied to the bootstrapping of the Intel compiler installation?  I am noticing very long compile times and found that a single instance of "ifort -v" can take up to 1.4 seconds to return.  This seems to be contributing to the long compilation times, since the "ifort -v" command should be doing a version check and an license check.  Any help on this would be appreciated.

For example:

$> ps -ef
UID         PID          PPID        CMD
user1      353858    353847     sshd:user1@pts/29
user1      353883    353858     -bash
user1      354023    353883     /bin/bash  ./testLicCO.sh
user1      379778    354023     ifort -v
user1      379783    379778     gcc -m64 -v -E /tmp/ifortdummyy5Z9FK.c