Profile of construction contractual claims

Abstract

It has been pointed out by IACM that the frequency of claims had increased by more than 30% in the last 3 years. This is a worrying trend as such there is a need for a project manager and contract administrator to adopt an anticipatory management approach by regularly monitoring and analysing the claims in their projects. One way of doing this is by identifying the pattern or trend of construction claims that have been reported in a law report. Therefore, this research aimed to develop profile of contractual claim in term of type of head of claim, causes of claim, the parties involved, type of project, the standard form, time of claim occur and the origin of claim resolution. This research is limited to Malaysian law cases between 1999 until 2013. This research is based on secondary data on 70 cases. These cases are analysed to obtain the pattern of different field of profile. This study indicates the claim for payment has the highest percentage of all project. It also points out that the highest cause to the payment claim is due to the claim for work done. It had been highlighted that the highest frequency of parties involved in claim for all type of project is the main contractor. Most of the claims are based on PAM standard form. This research also shows claims are commonly made during construction phase and the origin of claim resolution is going straight to the court. Hopefully, these profiles would be able to highlight the pattern or trend of the claim and can provide some guidelines for managers to anticipate in the future claims problem.