32 flagged calls, a shifting medical timeline, and a pre-Christmas dismissal
A New Zealand bank has successfully defended dismissing a call centre employee for serious misconduct, after the Employment Relations Authority found the employer navigated a tangled overlap of health issues, call avoidance concerns, and an alleged dishonest pre-employment medical declaration.
The determination, issued on November 3, 2026, dismissed all of the worker's claims - unjustified dismissal, unjustified disadvantage, disability discrimination, and breach of good faith.
The worker started at Kiwibank's contact centre in Hastings in June 2025 as a Customer Experience Representative handling everyday banking calls. The job was straightforward: be available, answer customer calls as they came through the system, and complete admin tasks after each call. The worker had spent roughly four years in a similar call centre role before joining Kiwibank.
Within two weeks, things started to shift.
The worker began requesting paid supported leave - a discretionary benefit under Kiwibank's leave policy, separate from statutory sick leave. By one month in, the worker had already been granted more than five days of it. On June 30, 2025, the worker told their manager they were feeling unwell, left to attend hospital, and called in sick the next day. No incident report was filed by either side.
A GP note, but no diagnosis
Through July and August 2025, the worker took leave intermittently while their manager maintained regular check-ins. The two sides tell different versions of what was communicated. The worker says Kiwibank knew the health issues were affecting work performance. The manager says the worker confirmed being fit for the role, said the symptoms were not work-related, and that no further support was needed beyond what had already been agreed - five-minute hourly stretch breaks and a temporary shift to full-time working from home.
A GP certificate provided on August 15, 2025 noted "peculiar cardiovascular symptoms for some months" but no unifying diagnosis. The GP supported the worker working exclusively from home "for a while."
Then the call data started raising flags.
32 calls of concern
In late August, Kiwibank's workforce management team flagged concerns about the worker's call handling: potential call avoidance, extended customer hold times, disconnected callbacks, and disproportionate time spent in after-call work relative to short calls.
One example stood out. The worker greeted a customer, then placed the call on hold for roughly 20 minutes with no attempt to re-engage, followed by a further seven minutes of after-call work. The worker's explanation - testing a headset - did not, in the manager's view, match the call record.
An investigation identified 32 calls of concern over about a month, from early August to early September 2025. To Kiwibank, the pattern pointed to the worker avoiding the core function of the job.
On September 7, 2025, Kiwibank issued a formal disciplinary letter, flagging the call concerns as potential serious misconduct and warning that termination was a possible outcome.
Months of medical certificates and rescheduled meetings
What followed was an extended procedural back-and-forth. The worker requested - and was granted - time to obtain a representative, a paid day off to review the call material, and multiple reschedulings of the disciplinary meeting. Medical certificates kept extending the worker's absence: seven days, then 14, then 30.
The worker was certified unfit but still provided written responses to the allegations, attributing the call issues to medical recovery between calls, technical errors, and misunderstandings about break notification requirements.
Kiwibank paused the process repeatedly. It asked for consent to seek further medical information - diagnosis, prognosis, return-to-work timeline, recommendations for workplace adjustments. The worker sought legal advice before consenting and ultimately did not provide consent. By the time the discretionary paid leave was withdrawn in late September, the worker had received approximately 22 days of it - well above any statutory entitlement.
The timeline that didn't add up
In early December 2025, the worker provided a specialist report dated November 4, 2025. It stated that the worker's "major" and "escalating" symptoms had been "present since approximately October 2024" - months before the worker joined Kiwibank.
That clashed with what the worker had told the manager in August 2025: that symptoms started on June 30, 2025, roughly two weeks into the job.
It also raised questions about the worker's pre-employment application form, completed on April 30, 2025. On that form, the worker was asked whether there were any current or past medical issues that might restrict job performance or be exacerbated by the role. The worker answered no. The form included an acknowledgement that providing false information could result in dismissal.
Kiwibank added a second allegation - dishonest and misleading conduct during recruitment and the earlier August meeting - and warned that dismissal without notice was a possible outcome.
The worker pointed to a medical certificate from May 1, 2025 - the day after the pre-employment form was completed - in which a doctor recorded there was "no obvious reason" the worker could not work. The worker said this supported a genuine belief of fitness at the time. But that certificate was never provided to Kiwibank during the employment. It only surfaced once the Authority proceedings were underway in March 2026.
A pre-Christmas dismissal
Kiwibank issued a preliminary decision on December 18, 2025, finding all allegations substantiated. The worker had until December 22 to respond. The worker rejected the preliminary decision, alleging the process was predetermined and that the conduct had been condoned.
On December 23, 2025, Kiwibank confirmed the dismissal for serious misconduct.
What the Authority found
The Authority found Kiwibank identified legitimate concerns, investigated them, raised them clearly, gave the worker reasonable opportunities to respond, and genuinely considered the explanations provided.
On the central question - whether Kiwibank should have treated the issues as a health matter rather than misconduct - the Authority was direct. It cited the Employment Court's earlier decision in Dunn v Waitemata District Health Board, which held that when an employee raises health concerns during a disciplinary process, the employer should seek medical information and be responsive to the circumstances. But the employer is not required to abandon the disciplinary process altogether.
That is what Kiwibank did, the Authority found. It paused the process multiple times, sought medical information, and made reasonable accommodations. But the worker did not engage constructively on the medical front - providing successive medical certificates without the prognosis, return-to-work timeline, or adjustment recommendations that Kiwibank kept requesting. The worker's explanations for the call data were found to be "insufficient, inconsistent and implausible" when measured against the records and the repeated pattern over time.
On discrimination, the Authority found no evidence of discriminatory treatment, noting the accommodations Kiwibank had made - flexible working from home beyond what was standard, paid leave for material review, multiple meeting reschedulings, and the option to respond in writing.
On good faith, the Authority rejected the argument that the timing of the dismissal - right before the Christmas shutdown, with final pay delayed until January 14, 2026 because payroll had closed for the year - was unreasonable.
For HR teams, the case is a practical roadmap for one of the hardest calls in people management: how to run a disciplinary process when an employee raises health issues mid-stream. Seek the medical information, pause when you need to, accommodate where reasonable - but a conduct concern does not have to become a capacity one when the employee does not engage on the medical front.
