The employer waited two years to act - the worker argued that alone made her sacking unfair
An IT worker dismissed over dishonesty a court found in her own injury case has lost her bid to overturn the sacking.
The South Australian Employment Tribunal upheld the dismissal of a long-serving civilian employee of the state's police force, closing a disciplinary process that ran for more than two years. The decision, handed down on July 30, 2026, is a practical guide for any HR team weighing whether it can act on findings made in another forum - and how much of its own process it still has to run.
The worker, an IT project officer, had brought two workers compensation claims for physical injuries. A judge rejected both in April 2020 and found she had been deliberately untruthful in parts of her evidence, including withholding earlier symptoms linked to a private car trip and giving inconsistent accounts of her condition. A later decision ordered her to pay the employer's legal costs. She has consistently denied any dishonesty.
The employer treated those court findings as the basis for discipline. Its position was that a court had already determined the dishonesty question after hearing the evidence, so it did not need to investigate the same issue from scratch. It adopted the findings, assessed the conduct as a breach of the public sector code of ethics, and moved to sanction.
The tribunal accepted that approach was open to the employer - the first key point for HR. Where an independent decision-maker has already made findings after hearing the evidence, an employer can generally rely on them rather than repeat the whole exercise. The tribunal noted the employer chose to investigate more widely anyway, which added complexity and stretched the timeline.
Timing was the worker's strongest argument. The employer knew about the findings in April 2020 but did not suspend her until May 2022, and did not dismiss her until January 2023. She argued that keeping her at her desk for around two years could not be reconciled with later treating the conduct as serious enough to justify dismissal.
The tribunal was not persuaded. It found the timeline had reasonable explanations - overlapping duties to return her to suitable work after an accepted psychological injury, a parallel redeployment process, waiting on legal advice, and a separate review of whether criminal charges would be laid. Just as important, it found the delay caused no prejudice to her ability to respond to the allegations, and she lost no income before termination.
The worker also raised departures from the employer's own disciplinary procedures, including an argument that an investigator's misconduct finding should have been removed from the report before it reached the decision-maker, and that she was asked to respond in writing rather than in an interview. The tribunal accepted there were some departures from internal policy, though on the redaction point it found there was not enough evidence to decide either way. Its broader conclusion was the one HR teams should note: not following an internal guideline does not, on its own, make a dismissal invalid or unfair. What matters is whether the employee received the substance of procedural fairness - fair notice of the allegations, a genuine chance to respond, and an independent decision-maker. On the facts, the tribunal found she did.
Two further arguments did not succeed. On delegation, the tribunal found the officer who signed the dismissal letter was acting in the role that held the power to dismiss, so the dismissal was validly authorised. On the sanction, it weighed the worker's long service and prior work record, and her age - she was 63 - against the seriousness of dishonesty in public sector employment and earlier dishonesty-related disciplinary findings against her from 2015. It concluded that honesty was fundamental to the role and that her circumstances did not make dismissal harsh, unjust or unreasonable.
The application was dismissed. The dismissal stands.
For HR professionals, the signals are practical. Findings from another forum can anchor internal discipline. Delay is survivable if it can be explained and causes no real prejudice. And departures from internal process are not necessarily fatal - provided the employee genuinely received a fair hearing on what mattered.
