The study on the scope of work in Public Construction Contracts

• Main Authors: Cheng-i Wang, 王政一
• Other Authors: Chih-ming Jau
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/83062732349904363711

碩士 === 國立高雄大學 === 法律學系碩士班 === 102 === One very important part of any contract, whether between and owner and general contractor, is the so called “scope of work”. The owner will claim the contract's scope of work includes all work performed or promised to be performed by the contractor for the agreed contract price. However, the scope of work isn’t obvious.The parties to the contract may interpret the contractor's responsibilities differently, leading to disputes related to the work to he performed and the compensation to be paid. The owner wants as much work as possible for the payment, whereas the contractor wants to do as little as possible. Therefore, the owner tries to define the scope as broadly as possible; in contrast, the contractor seeks to define specific tasks, with everything else being an "extra". Besides , public construction projects are characterized by long duration, being influenced greatly by weather and site conditions, involving numerous professionals and difficult to estimate the total cost. Hence participators of a public construction project are often unable to foresee the obstacles confronted during the whole process. Therefore, alternating a public construction contract is not unusual and will create an issue whether the contract price should be adjusted accordingly. Public construction contracts are unusual amongst commercial contracts in that they generally have interpretations and variation/ changes clauses. This paper will mainly focus on the scope of work. The discussion of issues includes exposition, variation/change, quantity difference, omitted items, and differing site condition. As for the research method, except the analysis bases on the domestic legal cases, the thesis also attempts to discuss about scholar’s opinions about such issues. The discussion also attempts to combine the engineering field and the legal field, and at last, intends to submit some opinions or recommendations in order to provide a reference for the court or construction practice in dealing with the disputes of public construction contracts.