Recent case involves employer giving multiple warnings about breaches of policy
For HR professionals, timesheets and attendance records are important tools for accurately tracking workers’ hours and ensuring compliance with labour laws.
Falsifying this information can lead to inaccurate payroll figures and costly mistakes, and in Australia, penalties can be imposed on individuals and corporations that would be found to commit such misconduct.
It is considered a breach of trust, integrity, and transparency which can have severe consequences.
In this case, the worker was caught falsifying timesheets, despite the employer’s repeated warning that it was against the company’s policy to misreport the times worked.
Background of the case
The worker was formerly a disability support worker and served at a group home. He was dismissed around June 2022 for alleged timesheet falsification, which he “firmly denied.”
The employer said that he had been given multiple warnings that falsifying records was a breach of its policy from 2020 onwards.
The trigger for his dismissal happened around March last year. He was rostered for a shift from 2:00 pm to 9:00 pm at a group home.
According to records, the service manager attended the group at around 8:10 pm and “having looked around, formed the view that the worker was not there.” The manager then called and emailed the senior operations manager to alert them that the worker “had left his shift early.” The service manager also “amended the timesheet to reflect that the [worker] left work at around 8:00 pm.”
During the investigation and show cause process, the worker denied the allegation but “offered no explanation for the alleged conduct.”
The Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia (FCFCOA) held a company at fault for failing to provide payslips to its employees.
Left work early
For his defence, the worker said that he completed his shift at 9:00 that day and was at the “outside courtyard” of the group home when the service manager looked around. He submitted that the allegation was “purely fabricated” so that he would be removed from the organisation and said there is a “range of issues that he had agitated concerning conditions at the home and interactions with supervisors.”
Based on the evidence received by the Fair Work Commission (FWC), it was found that the worker “had left the workplace earlier than he recorded on the timesheet.”
HRD also previously reported an unfair dismissal claim of an employee who was demoted after missing a shift due to oversleeping.
As to warnings related to the disability support worker’s “unsatisfactory performance,” the commission noted this was “not strictly a performance-related dismissal” and was “more accurately, a conduct-related dismissal.”
It found that the worker “had been spoken to, cautioned and instructed previously about timesheet-related matters,” adding that he was consistently warned that falsifying timesheets was a breach of the employer’s policy. Thus, the FWC dismissed the worker’s claim for unfair dismissal.
