She called it a reflexive correction. Her employer reached a very different conclusion
A Melbourne insurance brokerage sacked a worker after she edited a document she then filed in her own case against the company.
The Fair Work Commission has now found the dismissal was not unfair, dismissing her claim in a decision handed down on September 4, 2026.
The worker had been with the firm since early 2021. Her contract listed her as an account manager. The company said she had always been treated and paid as a senior account executive, and that mismatch over her title sat underneath the whole dispute.
By August 2025, one of the firm's two directors had decided she was not productive enough working from home. Pointed emails followed, then a first and final warning on November 27, 2025 covering her work-from-home output and what the firm called “dishonesty.” Days later, she lodged a general protections claim with the Commission, arguing she had been underpaid and made to do senior-level work under a junior title.
What she attached to that claim became the flashpoint. Back in 2022, she had written a letter thanking the company for opportunities “in my role as Senior Account Manager.” The copy she filed in 2025 had the word “Senior” removed, so it read “in my role as Account Manager” - lining up with her argument that her real title was only ever account manager.
One director told the Commission that when he compared the two versions, “alarm bells went off.” He said he considered the change to be, in his words, “effectively fraud designed to bolster her claims,” and that “trust was too far gone.”
The worker firmly denied any intent to mislead. Through her lawyers, she said she had opened a copy of the letter saved on her work laptop and deleted “Senior” as “a reflexive correction” to match her contract, then “completely forgotten” about the change by the time she filed. She said she was “sincerely remorseful.”
The firm issued a show-cause letter on December 8, 2025 and suspended her on full pay. It did not accept her explanation, and dismissed her on December 15, 2025 for serious misconduct.
Here is the part HR teams should sit with. The Commission never decided whether the edit actually was fraud. Under the Small Business Fair Dismissal Code, that is not the test. For an employer with fewer than 15 staff, a dismissal without notice holds up if the employer genuinely believed, on reasonable grounds, that the conduct was serious enough to justify it - and looked into the matter reasonably first. Being right about the misconduct is not required.
The worker tried to argue the brokerage was not a small business at all. She said it operated inside a larger national insurance group whose staff - more than a hundred people - should count toward its head count. The Commission disagreed. The brokerage was owned by its two directors and stood as its own business: a joint venture with the bigger group did not make them one company, and the group had no control over how the brokerage was run. With 14 employees, it was a small business.
On the process, the Commission was satisfied the firm had done enough. It put its concerns in writing, gave her a chance to respond, and weighed her answer before acting. A genuine belief plus a reasonable investigation was all the Code required. And because the sacking cleared that small-business bar, the Commission did not need to weigh up whether it was otherwise harsh or unfair. That ended the case.
The practical lessons are concrete. Document the belief and the inquiry, not just the outcome. An earlier warning on a related issue - here, previous concerns about honesty - makes a later serious-misconduct call sturdier. Count your people carefully: a shared brand or a joint venture does not automatically fold another company's staff onto your books. And conduct tied to a worker's own case against you can itself become a reason to dismiss.
The application for an unfair dismissal remedy was dismissed.
