Worker

Employer

Anonymised Parties

An Assistant Financial Controller

A Hospitality Company

Representatives

  Self

Heather MacDonald IBEC

Act

Dispute Reference No.

Date of Receipt

Section 13 of the Industrial Relations Act 1969 (as amended)

ADJ-00041447

05/09/2022

The Worker worked for the Employer from 23/05/2022 until 09/08/2022 when he was dismissed.

The Worker submits that he was unfairly dismissed after raising significant issues with the Employer’s financial systems and trying to work around these issues.

The Employer submits that he was fairly dismissed in line with the probation clause in his contract of employment.

The Worker was dismissed during his probation period.

The Employer disputes the Worker’s characterisation of his training or the Employer’s systems.

The issue which arose and which led to his dismissal was core to his role. The Employer argues that it was entirely fair and reasonable in seeking to address these matters with the Worker.

The Worker was assigned an income audit file shortly after starting. This would involve reviewing a daily sales report and reconciling actual sales and revenue with what was then lodged in the bank. Difference could arise between the figures the sales tracking software would arrive at and those presented by the financial management software. Each day had to be balanced. The Worker was given training on this process.

From June 2022 the figures the Worker submitted had unresolved variances. The Financial Controller asked him to address these. The Financial Controller provided the Worker with a step by step guide in how to perform this task and actively held off assigning him more work until he became competent with it as it was a key financial control.

In late June there was a job chat with the Worker and the Financial Controller agreed to source him more training with the various software packages, which he attended.

The Worker was invited to a probation review meeting and put on notice that this could result in his termination. He was invited to bring a representative. The meeting ended with a number of issues that the Worker had to improve upon. Central to these was the income audit.

The Worker emailed the Financial Controller on the income audit and advised her that he had reconciled all differences with the exception of two. His Manager sought to ascertain how he did this as they could not have been resolved within the system due to monthly reporting deadlines.

The Manager could see that the Worker resolved these differences by manually changing the trial balance. This was not the procedure and was a serious issue as such changes were not recorded within the system. The Worker’s amendments were unaccountable to future review and audit.

The Financial Controller wrote to the Worker clearly setting out the issue and inviting him to a further probation review meeting. The letter was clear he could be dismissed and invited him to bring a representative.

Following this meeting a decision was made to terminate the Worker.

The Worker was hired as an Assistant Financial Controller. While he had some experience in this sort of role he had not used the Employer’s systems before.

He received limited training and was set doing income audit tasks which he was not supported in doing. There were no Standard Operating Procedures and his Manager did not communicate with him. He sought to raise these issues with the Financial Controller.

Following this he began receiving regular appraisals from his line manager which quickly resulted in his dismissal some 12 weeks after he started. He was given more training supports around this time but he was not given the time to utilise this training.

A number of issues were raised with him on the 28th of July and he was to be given an opportunity to work on these issues. Shortly after this meeting he was contracted again by the Financial Controller who suggested he had amended figures provided to her so that they would reconcile. The Worker had amended a trial balance in an attempt to resolve the differences in the accounting systems. This was necessary due to a fault with the software and the only way to resolve the issue was by amending the trial balance.

A further probation meeting was called a few days later to consider this issue.  The differences accumulated to just over €600 euro and the revenue for the hospitality group was over 1.2 million euro.

On the 09.08.2022 he was asked to attend a probation review outcome meeting and was immediately dismissed. He was offered an appeal and sought to take up the opportunity to challenge the decision but he then saw that his position was already being advertised. As such it was clearly a sham process.

The Complainant refers to the Labour Court decision of Beechside Company Limited t/a Park Hotel Kenmare v A worker and ‘O’ Donovan v Over C Technology Ltd. & Another [2020] IEHC 291.

In conducting my investigation, I have taken into account all relevant submissions presented to me by the parties.

While much is in dispute between the parties one key aspect is agreed. The Worker manually changed trial balance figures to make the two sets of figures generated by the sales system and the financial management system reconcile.

The Employer maintains that this was entirely incorrect and created a serious flaw in their financial control system. The Worker maintains that this was the correct course of action and the only way to work around the Employer’s software issues.

While I accept that the Worker’s belief is genuinely held and there was no dishonesty in what he did it is important to note that these opinions are not equal. He was hired to work for the Employer and was required to do so in the manner proscribed by the Employer.

While I am not an expert on accountancy or financial compliance, I do understand the key point raised by the Employer, that the changes that the Worker made were not normally recorded by the system. As such they undermined the proper recording of the Employers finances in an way that could be independently verified and understood at a later date. 

The Worker was still under probation. The Employer followed fair procedures and put him on notice of the relevant issues and considered these issues in two separate probation meetings.

Ultimately they found that the Worker was not performing the tasks assigned to him in the way they wanted him to carry out these tasks and opted to dismiss him.

I do not see how they breached any obligation to him in doing so.