An application has come in with a figure that can't be right
Everyone agrees it's wrong, nobody serves the notice, and the wrong figure becomes the sum legally due.
What's happening?
The application is double last month's with no new work to show for it, and the office consensus is that it's nonsense. Consensus is not a notice. The Construction Act's machinery doesn't ask whether an application was reasonable - it asks whether a valid Payment Notice or Pay Less Notice was served in time. Silence, plus the dates passing, can turn the nonsense number into the notified sum: payable in full first, argued about later.
Adjudicators decide these disputes on the documents and the dates, not on how obviously wrong the figure was. So the response to a bad application is mechanical: assess it properly, serve the notice inside the window, state the sum you say is due and the basis - however confident everyone feels about the merits. The service exists to make that mechanical: every application met with a valid, timed notice, as routine rather than as a scramble.
The solution
Wrong figures answered with notices, not opinions.