Disciplinary Investigations

[BMRed]

Totally agree with everyone on getting out.

It’s left a bad taste in my mouth, which is a shame as I enjoy my work, proud of what I have achieved and happy with my immediate team. It’s the processes and wider beast of the company that has tarnished this now.

I’m taking a few weeks off from next week to decompress and plan next steps.

[Funk]

BMRed said:

Thanks all. Good news, case was dropped.

My manager backed me in the investigation. I received the good news in an email “no further action”. It’s been hell but I’m glad it’s over.

That's great news but based on your earlier posts it sounds like you should still get hunting for something new anyway for the sake of your health and sanity. It's stty that a company would put you through all of that the way they did in the first place, especially with 13 years of service under your belt.

I left a job that was similar stress, hours and a lot of travel, took a dip on the basic initially but I now work somewhere where I love my job and the people I work with - been here 12 years and the icing on the cake is I'm earning more overall than I ever have.

No job is worth sacrificing your health and happiness for.

[Forester1965]

Paper trails are your friend. Have an email for everything.

I always drummed into my staff to follow up meetings and conversations where anything material was discussed with a brief email summarising what was agreed/action points. People can revise history (innocently as well as maliciously) with the passage of time.

[StevieBee]

BandOfBrothers said:

Macneil said:

I think editing an invoice was a bad idea...one person's edit is another person's fraud.

No, fraud is decided by a court, not "one man's" opinion.

From what the OP explained, what he did was a perfectly reasonable and normal thing to do.

You are correct about the fraud. But you are wrong on the normality of the action.

Fraud is the deliberate misrepresentation of fact for personal gain. Deliberately editing or adjusting a legal document (which is what an invoice is) even for all the right reason and good intent, is illegal. I know this because I have done it.

10 years ago, I booked a flight and then paid to upgrade to business class. The receipt showed the total cost but I was only claiming the economy fare. Rather than open an admin can-of-worms, I edited the flight receipt in Acrobat to show only the economy fare, forgetting that I had previously submitted the flight confirmation details which showed the total cost including Business. The difference was spotted and queried. The ramification for me was an email asking me not to do this again (just add a note along with the receipt), pointing out the illegality of it. And that was that. Lesson learned.

OP: It really sounds to me like you have little to worry about. At worst, there's an issue around process. A few people have said that you should sign yourself off until it's resolved. If you can I really would advise against this. If you have nothing to hide, then don't hide.

[VeeReihenmotor6]

BMRed said:

I later found out that the policy was silently updated late last year with no communication to employees. My manager confirmed that there was no communication about the updated policies.

There were a couple of expenses where I lost the invoice and had to use a bank statement. Additionally, I only needed to claim 25% of the value of one invoice, but it kept getting rejected because it didn’t match the value. I edited the invoice to say the total payment was £x, claiming £x. Due to this, they are pursuing fraudulent invoices for personal gain.

I have provided all bank statements and original statements, but it's been 4 weeks, and I still haven’t heard anything back about what happens next. The anxiety is overwhelming, and my work performance has suffered as a result.

Couple of bits taken from your post. I am a Financial Controller for an organisation and see expenses, in my organisation I have a handful of people who do silly things (like share their company credit card numbers to team members or "make up" aggregations of breakfast/lunch/dinner limits to have a massive team meal etc).

Anyway, the bit where you fiddled the invoice and submitted has put you on this path. It is also your responsibility as an employee of the organisation to be familiar with policies. Yes your organisation should have made you aware of any updates but as an employee you have a duty to familiarise yourself with the rules. Also you policy will clearly state receipts should be numbered and submitted with expense claims, it sounds from your post that you have lost many of these too. You have probably irritated the finance department and compounded with the fiddling of an invoice you've put yourself in a situation where the "cherry has been put on the cake" for action.

In my place we are very lenient and generally just have a chat with offenders, often repeated, but my organisation has that type of culture. Elsewhere I would imagine you'll get either a verbal or written warning. Dismissal is also an option if you can't prove you were not being fraudulant and since you are missing receipts you've created an uphill battle for yourself.

Edited by VeeReihenmotor6 on Wednesday 17th April 10:37

[Forester1965]

It's unreasonable to update policies without alerting staff whilst simultaneously expecting them to adhere to them.

Many corporates have dozens of policy documents. There's no way you'd be expected to read each of them daily to check for updates.

[Jasandjules]

VeeReihenmotor6 said:

It is also your responsibility as an employee of the organisation to be familiar with policies. Yes your organisation should have made you aware of any updates but as an employee you have a duty to familiarise yourself with the rules.

Well, I advise companies in respect of Employment Law issues, how to conduct disciplinaries etc.. and I would be telling them to wind their necks in if they were taking action against an employee in respect of a policy change which was not communicated. Especially one such as expenses where it is self evident that people would be submitting expenses next month following that change.

[Muzzer79]

VeeReihenmotor6 said:

It is also your responsibility as an employee of the organisation to be familiar with policies. Yes your organisation should have made you aware of any updates but as an employee you have a duty to familiarise yourself with the rules.

So I should check all of the company policies on a regular basis to see if one has been updated without my knowledge?

That's incorrect. It's the company's responsibility to alert employees to policy changes.

[sam.rog]

Muzzer79 said:

VeeReihenmotor6 said:

It is also your responsibility as an employee of the organisation to be familiar with policies. Yes your organisation should have made you aware of any updates but as an employee you have a duty to familiarise yourself with the rules.

So I should check all of the company policies on a regular basis to see if one has been updated without my knowledge?

That's incorrect. It's the company's responsibility to alert employees to policy changes.

When I first started I read the company policy on the things that would concern me day to day. Any changes to those policies the company sends out a company wide email stating the change and a link to the new policy.
This is what a decent company does. It takes 10 minutes at most to put an email together with links.

[Sunday Drive]

Good result OP.

Enjoy your time off and I hope you find a better and alternative employment soon.

[VeeReihenmotor6]

Muzzer79 said:

VeeReihenmotor6 said:

It is also your responsibility as an employee of the organisation to be familiar with policies. Yes your organisation should have made you aware of any updates but as an employee you have a duty to familiarise yourself with the rules.

So I should check all of the company policies on a regular basis to see if one has been updated without my knowledge?

That's incorrect. It's the company's responsibility to alert employees to policy changes.

All company policies I have ever seen are freely available to all employees, they have their "last update" and "next update" clearly defined on the front cover page and often there is a list of all policies with their update dates in one place.

All policies are ratified by something like a "Leadership Team" for comment prior to being made live. I've never seen a policy get written in total isolation.

Usually policies like expenses are pushed out to all employees, we have just updated ours at my place and followed this procedure... yet many still get it wrong and are unaware.

You can take a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. One of the reason policies are publicly listed internally, timestamped and next update stamped is to protect the organistation from what JasandJules mentions above. From the companies point of view, if you've done eveything you can to update employees and they basically don't read their emails, how can it be the company at fault?

Edited by VeeReihenmotor6 on Thursday 18th April 09:39

[Countdown]

I think the key thing is that the staff need to be actively reminded when policies have been updated (rather than being expected to check them on an ad-hoc basis). IME companies tend to send an all-staff email when policies change, as well as putting it in the weekly staff newsletter.