What is a pay-less notice?

Administrative lateness, converted into legal liability

This is the part that catches people, and it catches them once. The notice regime does not ask whether the claim was fair. It asks whether you served the notice, in the prescribed form, within the prescribed period.

If you did not, the “notified sum” is payable. Not the value of the work. The number on the application. A subcontractor who has over-claimed by a wide margin can be paid the over-claim, in full, because somebody missed a date — and there is a whole species of adjudication built on exactly that.

What the notice has to do

State the sum you consider due, and the basis on which it is calculated. Vagueness is fatal here: a notice that gestures at dissatisfaction without setting out the arithmetic is a notice that does not work.

And it has to be on time. The clock is set by the contract, and the contract is set against the statute. Neither of them is interested in how busy the quantity surveyor was that week.

Where there is no such regime

Across much of the Gulf there is no equivalent statute and no adjudication safety net. It is tempting to conclude that certification discipline matters less there. The opposite is true.

With no statutory mechanism to appeal to, the certification record is the only record. What was certified, what was reduced, why, and when — documented at the time — is simultaneously your cash-flow control and your entire dispute position. There is nothing else to fall back on.

Terms

• Pay-Less Notice