She scored below every threshold and still won her dismissal claim
An employer must pay $30,000 after Tribunal Magistrate Joel Tan ruled on 28 July 2026 that a probationer's dismissal lacked just cause.
The decision turned on a familiar scenario: a probationer scored below the employer's own thresholds, yet the employer could not defend the dismissal. The claimant, hired in April 2025 as a regional internal control audit manager on a six-month probation, was told in October that her performance fell short and given two weeks' notice. Her last day was 31 October 2025.
The employer's suitability standards required an overall goal score of at least 80% and an average competency rating of at least 3 out of 5. The claimant reached 71% and 2.4. On paper, she failed. The tribunal found the numbers behind those figures unreliable.
Her reporting supervisor rated her 2, below average, on six of ten competencies. Had any one been a 3, her average would have passed. But the supervisor never explained what each competency required, ran none of the periodic reviews the employer's own probation process mandated, and left the justification column in the evaluation form blank. The reasons offered came only at the hearing. The tribunal described the ratings as, in substance, the supervisor's impressions dressed up as a suitability review.
The performance goals fared no better. On the highest-weighted goal, worth 50%, the supervisor deducted 25 points for missed deadlines and formatting. The tribunal found neither proven, though it accepted the claimant had refused a direct request for interim reporting. Even so, that single lapse could not justify so large a deduction on a standard she was never told carried such weight.
A second goal lost 25 points for delays the tribunal attributed to overseas subsidiaries, not the claimant. A third goal quietly doubled in weight after the supervisor moved a removed task's 10% onto it, without telling the claimant, then penalised her heavily using a scoring method she had never seen. A fourth goal, on training, collapsed because the employer could not prove what it had actually asked her to do.
The claimant had sensed the problem herself. She said she felt her supervisor was "evaluating [her] at the wrong side of the audit table." The tribunal treated that not as an admission of incompetence but as evidence of a genuine gap between what the supervisor valued and what the role required.
Two further claims failed. The claimant alleged her dismissal was linked to her inability to understand Korean, the language of some senior discussions, and separately to concerns she raised about a proposed audit restructuring. The tribunal accepted language could ground discrimination but found no evidence it drove this dismissal, and it dismissed the retaliation claim as speculative, accepting that decision-makers were unaware of her concerns at the time.
On the successful ground, the tribunal awarded three months' loss of income, capped by the $30,000 tribunal limit against a gross monthly salary of $11,500, plus $300 in costs and $60 in disbursements.
The judgment turned on a single distinction: "Ignorance of a standard and inability to meet it are different things." A probation process existed on paper. The employer did not run it as designed, and the below-threshold scores proved only that the standards had never been made clear.
