When an employee's role is unclear, accepting resignations without question courts risk
Silence cost one employer at the Fair Work Commission, after a 5 March 2026 ruling found that doing nothing was itself a dismissal.
Joanna Yi began working at EPEC Group Pty Ltd on 6 November 2024 as a casual Senior Accountant. From April 2025, Ms Yi says she was performing the role of Group Finance Manager following a verbal announcement to staff. She had ongoing discussions with her manager, Mr Silvester, and HR representative, Mr Mudge, about formalising her contract in writing. Notably, neither man ever contradicted her claim in any of the correspondence tendered to the Commission.
In August 2025, a new Head of Finance was appointed. On 27 August 2025, Ms Yi and Mr Silvester spoke about the role. Ms Yi's account is that she was told the position required relocation from Melbourne to Brisbane, and that when she said she could not move, Mr Silvester told her: "if you're not going to move to Brisbane then you will need to resign."
EPEC disputes this. The company maintains Ms Yi was always a casual Senior Accountant, was never appointed to the Group Finance Manager role, and was never told to resign. EPEC says her substantive Senior Accountant role remained available to her in Melbourne, and that she resigned voluntarily out of frustration over not receiving the new role, with a misunderstanding about its requirements.
Hours after that conversation, Ms Yi sent her resignation, giving seven days' notice. Her last working day was 5 September 2025.
When it came to the resignation letter itself, EPEC's witness Ms Galloway told the Commission she had read it. She did not think to speak with Ms Yi about it.
That decision proved costly.
Commissioner Fox, in a decision dated 5 March 2026 in Joanna Yi v Epec Group Pty Ltd [2026] FWC 749, found that EPEC's passive acceptance of the resignation crossed a line. Importantly, the Commissioner did not need to resolve whether Ms Yi was actually performing the Group Finance Manager role. Even on EPEC's own account, if the Senior Accountant position remained available and unchanged in Melbourne, the company was on notice that Ms Yi was leaving based on a mistaken belief. The opportunity to correct that was not taken. As Commissioner Fox found: "I consider EPEC's acceptance of Ms Yi's resignation without further clarifying what it considered to be her actual position, and the need for her to relocate to Brisbane, to be a termination at the initiative of EPEC."
EPEC's jurisdictional objection was dismissed and the matter will proceed to conference.
For people and culture professionals, the case surfaces two risks that are far from rare. The first is the informal role change. Ms Yi had been performing what she believed to be a more senior position for months, with no written contract to confirm it. Neither Mr Silvester nor Mr Mudge ever put the arrangement in writing, and that gap was a vulnerability the employer could not recover from.
The second is how resignations are processed. When an employee's role or contract status is unclear, accepting a resignation without any follow-up conversation carries genuine legal risk. A single clarifying exchange could have changed the outcome entirely.
The relocation question also carries a direct message for HR teams. The Commissioner found, as an alternative basis for the decision, that presenting Ms Yi with a move-or-resign ultimatum, with no discussion of any alternative arrangement, was itself a forced dismissal. That finding has direct relevance for any HR team managing workforce mobility, office consolidations, or structural role changes.
