A warmly worded email met a payroll slip-up — and the Fair Work Commission had to decide what really ended the job
A sympathetic note telling a resigning employee to "finalise" early was not a dismissal, the Fair Work Commission has ruled — though a payroll slip complicated the picture.
The decision, handed down on 6 May 2026 in Roula Bekai v Samma Real Estate, is a quietly useful read for HR teams who handle resignations and final pay. It turns on a familiar workplace moment: an employee gives notice, the employer decides she does not need to work it out, and everyone assumes the parting is clean. In this case, it was not.
Bekai, an Operations Manager – Property Development at the real estate business, resigned in writing on 22 September 2025 and nominated 30 October 2025 as her last day — comfortably more than the four weeks her contract required. Three days later, she emailed the company's director, Mr Abdelmalak, about how she planned to manage her handover while dealing with some health and wellbeing concerns.
His reply was warm. "I'm sorry to hear that you are unwell, and I hope you're able to focus on rest and recovery," he wrote, before adding: "I believe it's best that we finalise your employment as of today. We will of course pay out all your leave and entitlements in full."
Bekai read that email as a dismissal. She brought an application under section 365 of the Fair Work Act 2009, arguing her employer had ended the job at its own initiative — and pointed out that the company had not made a clear and contemporaneous payment in lieu of notice to back up its version of events. The employer said it had simply chosen, as the contract allowed, to pay out the rest of the notice period rather than require her to keep working.
Commissioner Clarke sided with the employer. The email, he found, was a "well-intentioned effort to spare her the difficulty of managing a handover and transition" — an election to pay notice in lieu, not a termination. The application was dismissed.
That could have been the end of it, except for what happened in payroll. The Commissioner found that the payment in lieu had been calculated as though Bekai's notice ended on 20 October 2025, not the 30 October date she had nominated. He called it an error, and issued a sharp warning: an employer cannot "have its cake and eat it too" by treating an exit as a resignation while paying only the lesser amount it would have owed had it dismissed the employee on minimum notice.
For HR practitioners, that is the line to underline. If an employee offers more notice than the contract requires and the company decides to pay the balance in lieu, the cheque has to match the employee's full nominated notice — not the contractual minimum. Get that wrong, and a generously worded farewell email can start to look, objectively, like a dismissal.
The takeaway is not that kindness is risky. It is that kindness needs to be matched by accurate payroll. In Bekai's case, the employer's intent and the objective character of the communication carried the day. On a different set of facts, the numbers on the final payslip might have told a very different story.
