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The dispute resolution process in the construction industry is known for delays in settlement, with some cases even escalating to complex arbitration and litigation. To avoid conflicts turning into disputes, the parties need to be proactive in identifying and resolving conflicts in their nascent stages. It is here that innovative lean construction practices can potentially act as a game-changer to avoid disputes, and this study aims to attempt to understand this phenomenon empirically.

A questionnaire-based empirical study, followed by semi-structured interviews, is conducted to understand the relevance of key tenets of lean principles in dispute avoidance.

Although stakeholders agree on the usefulness and practicality of lean principles in dispute avoidance, the extent of agreement is lesser when it comes to its implementation practicality. Moreover, there is a demographic influence observed on lean tenets such as “open communication”, “stakeholder collaboration” and “constraint identification”.

The results point towards an approach that combines contractual mandate, training and awareness creation to iron out the differences in the usefulness and practicality of lean approaches to avoid disputes.

Lean implementation is widely discussed in many construction contexts, such as sustainability, productivity improvement and planning. However, a discussion on lean philosophy’s role in dispute avoidance is muted. Therefore, this study assumes significance.

Illicit financial flows are targeted by the United Nations’ (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs). However, these illicit flows are not entirely understood. Furthermore, they can benefit from economic norms, laws and regulations that lack mechanisms to detect and penalize them. This paper aims to investigate whether a recent test, the embezzler test, can be used to identify regulatory architectures that facilitate illicit financial flows and related financial crimes.

This paper develops a more advanced version of the embezzler test in terms of definitions and practical implementation methodology.

In this test, the definition of embezzlement can be understood to be the occurrence of illicit financial flows crossing the boundaries of organizations and/or countries. This is a multistage test, which intentionally simulates illicit financial flows to observe how well equipped is the regulatory architecture to deal with other financial offences that are related with these flows, such as theft, money laundering, fraud, corruption, market manipulation and tax evasion.

Future research can use the version of this test to stress test a large range of economic norms, laws and regulations.

This test’s new version can assist achieve the UN SDGs’ illicit financial flow reduction target. Furthermore, it can be used to study both existing and proposed norms, laws and regulation.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first explicit test that has been presented to identify norms, laws and regulations that facilitate illicit financial flows and related financial crimes.