The employer was right about the performance - and still got the sacking wrong
An employer had a valid reason to sack an accountant for poor performance - and still lost the unfair dismissal case.
On August 14, 2026, the Fair Work Commission agreed that Coronation Property Co had a genuine reason to let an assistant accountant go - then found the dismissal unfair anyway. The story will ring true for any HR team that has managed someone out: the employer chased the wrong problem, and never told the worker the real one.
It started with an invoice. The company said the accountant had “altered an invoice amount from $185 to $56,100” in its accounting system, approved it beyond her authority, then reversed it without flagging it to a senior approver. The Commission didn’t accept that. It found the $56,100 was a simple data-entry error, not a deliberate act, and called the allegation letter “poorly worded” because it made her sound as though she had deliberately changed an invoice, when the wrong figure was just a typing mistake.
The company also said she broke its financial rules by reversing the entry without approval. But it could never produce those rules. Its own head of people and culture had never seen them, and repeated requests to the finance team went unanswered. The Commission accepted the accountant’s evidence that no such rule had ever been spelled out to her, and found she hadn’t been dishonest and hadn’t broken the company’s code of conduct.
The performance concerns, though, were real. The accountant had already been through a performance improvement plan and received a written warning about her judgment, accuracy and incomplete work. The Commission found her performance genuinely fell short of what the job needed - a valid reason to dismiss based on capacity, meaning her ability to do the role.
Here is where it came undone. On the same day, the employer handed her one letter accusing her over the invoice and a separate “show cause” list about her performance, then ran the whole exit as a misconduct case. It never plainly told her that performance was the reason she was about to lose her job - so she couldn’t properly respond to the real reason for her dismissal. The Commission called the process “heavy handed” and “confusing,” and found she had not been given a fair process.
Reinstatement was off the table. The Commission found the gap between employer and employee over what the job required was unlikely to be bridged, and that sending her back to a role she was unlikely to succeed in would not be right.
On compensation, the Commission estimated she would probably have stayed about three more months, worth $22,500 on her $90,000 salary. It then cut that by half because she waited roughly six months - from being placed on garden leave in September 2025 until March 2026 - before she started looking for other work. The final award was $11,250, to be paid within 21 days.
For HR, the lesson is about naming the reason. A dismissal for poor performance and a dismissal for misconduct are not the same thing, and treating one as the other - or blurring them together - can turn a solid exit into an unfair one. If the problem is capacity, say so plainly, put it directly to the employee, and give them a real chance to respond before you decide.
