I was fired for Gross Misconduct today.

[HoldingOnatoday]

Just need to talk to someone outside of my family really. It’s been a tough time recently, lost my mum and then I got Pneumonia and ended up in intensive care for six weeks.

I returned to work on Friday and had an investigation meeting where I was accused of submitting fraudulent expense mileage claims. I disputed some which were left on an agree to disagrees. Some id accidentally left in, where I’d been to visit clients homes, the clients had cancelled and I’d forgot to remove the mileage. Its auto done for us but alas I should’ve manually removed them. I accept responsibility and this is on me.

I’ve put in £10,000 (I do a lot of driving/stay in hotels) worth of expenses in the last year and £900 was found to be fraud. These were the cancelled ones I’d not deleted. They’re going to contact the police and I’m not sure if anything will come to it. It was done more job negligence (I’ve not been up to par) than maliciously. I’ve been scattered brained, driving 7 hours a day for work often and running on empty.

The thing is I’m good at my job, I’m a good person I’d like to think. But I’m so broken by this, I’ve finally got a good credit rating, which will now be damaged by mortgage repayments and bills being missed. I’m also scared at the prospect of going to prison/declaring this to future employers. I have offered to pay back and this was rejected.

Im not looking for Sympathy, just for a way forward because I really feel like ending it all today. I’ve applied for Christmas temp work today but not sure if anything will come from it.

Oh gosh OP, sending you a massive hug and hand-hold.

My older sister has very recently come out of some police entanglement because of her job, and got fired, plus a criminal record. It was over something really stupid.
It's been a super drawn-out process of over a year, but is finally coming to an end. It's been incredibly hard on the whole family.

No real advice to offer, just a lot of sympathy and best wishes. xxx

Surely you can go back and challenge their assumption of fraudulent intent on your part.
You should argue that this issue only arose due to the inefficient system in place in your organisation, which only cancels part of an entire client transaction rather than the entire thing. It is up to the organisation to ensure that when they allow a client appointment to be cancelled, they also ensure any linked mileage is also cancelled. Any cusory audit of the process will easily flag that relying on employees to manually cancel the mileage manually separately can result in missed cancellations. Failing to cancel the milease in this circumstance therefore, cannot without clear evidence to the contrary, be considered to be fraudulent.
I would go one step further to threaten them legal action for defamation and loss of future earnings if they so much as put anything in your HR record that hints at fraud, given the inadequacy of their processes and the fact that they cannot prove any fraudulent intent on your part.
If they put anything in your HR record without clear proof of fraudulent intent, this would be considered as maliciously destroying your future employment prospects.
Stop being so fearful, sit up and get a union rep or someone who can draft a strongly worded letter and try get your life back on track.
You have nothing to lose here by doing this. Take quick action before they have time to report to the police. If they report this, it will be a bigger battle on your hands as they will have no choice but to become entrenched in their position. Go and stop them now.

You are not going to prison. I can’t believe they threatened you with the police for £900. You definitely need to get some advice you have been treated appallingly.

OP, I 100% agree with talking to ACAS, and also check your home insurance because there is sometimes legal support for employment issues.

There is no chance of you going to prison.

I’m so sorry to hear this. Do please ring the Samaritans if you feel able to; they will listen to you and won’t judge.

i also think it’s worth contacting ACAS. Did your company follow the correct procedure? Have they known how much stress you have been under, and how unwell you have been?

Wishing you all the best.

Agree with others this does not sound like gross misconduct, unless you pretended you had actually gone to see the client it's an honest mistake that needs rectifying by paying back the money. Have they even followed process? I would appeal on the grounds that there was no intention to defraud, you were reliant on your boss to check your claim before authorising, you correctly put the cancellation through on other parts of the system and had raised that you were overworked and not at 100% accuracy especially on non client facing parts of your job.

I would expect CPS to laugh at any attempt to prosecute and would be amazed if other employees within your company had not made similar mistakes given the lack of any robustness in your system.

Cynically, I suspect your employer thinks you will be off for sometime and does not want to pay sick pay so is doing this to easily replace you.

If you can't face the stress of appealing yourself I would run it by a no win no fee employment lawyer and let them handle it. Let your employer feel the weight of it's actions.

Look after yourself

Hey @HoldingOnatoday I know it must have been an awful shock and there is alot of great practical advice on here but just wanted to say - lots of people get fired for gross misconduct and alot of the time it's a load of rubbish. In this case it seems you made a honest and easy mistake. My DH got fired a year ago for gross misconduct and took it really badly. But a year on he's in a new job and the whole thing blew over. In his case they said fraud too but they'd already listed elsewhere that they were planning to shut down his office. Sometimes they go looking for an excuse to give. Happens all the time.

I would argue that in reality you didn’t actually claim this money
It was their own system that gave you this money.

Surely if they have a system that knows you have to drive to these clients so calculates and claims the mileage for you, then they should have a system that automatically deducts the mileage when a client cancels.

If their system does not do this then especially if someone has been in hospital for 6 weeks with a life threatening illness and is driving for 7 hours per day and is exhausted then human error can occur and I don’t think that what they did was actually legal.

Have a look at your house insurance as most come with legal cover which covers employment disputes.
Exh used ours to win a 6 figure amount from an employer who sacked him for Gross Misconduct despite them not having a reason for the gross misconduct

OP, given the implications going forward, you might not feel up to the fight but it might be helpful to try and and row things back a little to help you in future employment.

As a PP has said, a local solicitor or employment law advice centre might be worth an immediate visit - they'll want to review the processes around the disciplinary procedure, their approach to the expenses and so on, partly to head off any police action but to put you on the front foot regarding keeping your job, getting a good reference and so on. Unless they've followed a robust process then you might find it helpful to convince them they'll be on a hiding to nothing. Each aspect of the process needs to be reviewed. If in England then you may be able to submit a grievance after dismissal but you would benefit from appearing to have solid advice behind you. Did you have the opportunity to bring a union representative to meetings, is the exenses policy clear...? Good luck.

Stop worrying about prison, unless its tens of thousands that won't even be considered.

I these circumstances I think your dismissal was harsh and unfair.
Please contact a union or someone in legal position
Sending you strength

So £900 over 9 months. At £0.45 per mile, that works out to 2,000 miles, so an average of 222 miles per month over 9 months. That's 50 miles per week. I can see why they don't want to just let it go.

Has anyone else had issues with the system?

This is unfair to OP, who has been clear that she has made the errors but that they weren't deliberately.

Phone ACAS. A process that automatically inserts claims for you and relies on you removing them is clearly flawed.

Prison is never happening for £900 where the system is fundamentally not fit for purpose.

You should push back and try to get a pay off.

In order for the boss to be checking, he or she will likely need to see evidence or confirm with her that every one of the listed trips actually happened. When you submit your expenses for reimbursement, this is confirmation that you consider all of them to be legitimate expenses. I think unless her boss had suspicions of her trips not being genuine, then how would he or she know to question them? I suppose he or she could ask her to provide evidence that all these trips in fact happened before approving the expense claims. It sounds like there is a trust element by the company that has clearly failed in this case.

I don't necessarily understand how you forget several trips over the course of 9 months. Forgetting one, ok, forgetting two ok, forgetting a number of trips that amount to almost £1000...it doesn't sound plausible to me. I don't think they are unreasonable to raise this as a problem. If they go back even further, would they find more forgotten trips over the years?

I would definitely get legal advice, however I also doubt you will be prosecuted and sent to jail or anything like that as it's not a huge amount of money in the grand scheme of things.

Its just a job. Tomorrow is another day.

Speak to Samaritans. And GP for a review. Speak to mortgage company

Ask a friend to come over for tea or just to be with you. Or watch your favourite program.

One step at a time.

There is much good advice here OP.

I would see a solicitor specialising in criminal law regarding the fraud claim aspect - as the claims were supposed to be checked by a manager above you I cannot see how it can be classed as fraud, negligence yes, but by multiple parties.

I would strongly advise that if the police do contact you DO NOT say anything to them or attend any form of interview without a legal representative present.

This is why it's good to get ahead of the game and have the solicitor ready to go. The solicitor may find it appropriate to write to your former employers outlining your ofter to re-imbuse and their refusal of said offer - that aspect would not help any case they may think they have, but be guided by the professional.

Remember the police get many reports like this, and in many cases they do nothing, because it's a systems / admin / mistake situation. Whatever you will be spared prison dinners!

You poor thing. I’m so sorry. You’ve really been through it. I understand. I hope the coming weeks ease for you.

you poor thing. Definitely speak to Acas - they were so helpful and kind to me when I had a work issue many years ago.
and speak to the Samaritans too.

I think it’s pure resilience that you already started looking for Christmas work! Amazing and positive. You won’t miss this job at all.

there is zero chance of you going to court or going to prison.

if you are blamed because you didn’t check then your manager is guilty in exactly the same way.

it’s a tiny amount of money- it is!. It’s a mistake that’s easily made. That’s why it happened several times.

you have been seriously ill and you need a better more supportive work environment anyway.

deep breaths. Hot bath tonight and Netflix. Order a pizza. Speak to good friends if you have any around you.

you’re going to be ok and I think you’re doing brilliantly already. You’ve spoken about it here and you will get through this time.

if you were my neighbour I’d come straight over to you now and look after you.

How long have you been employed by them?

Oh my goodness op that sounds like a terrible system and I can totally imagine myself forgetting to check if the system has taken out rhe cancelled journeys even without all the extenuating circumstances that you had going on.

I don't have any knowledge about any of this but I cannot for the life of me imagine that you could do prison time for this. Even if it was done fraudulently it sounds like a really minor amount.

Have you asked your manager to advocate for you? Give you a character reference? Any other manager? And if you are covered by any union at all definitely do get them involved.

Best of luck!! And please don't be hard on yourself. You haven't committed a grave crime or even a massive blunder that has negatively affected a lot of people. Huge hugs.

or -

1. expenses are inputted automatically based on the appointments booked in
2. appointment cancelled by client last minute via call to OP
3. OP fails to notify company of cancelled appt and WFH instead
4. OP fails to manually amend monthly expenses claim as per policy
5. OP manager not notified of cancelled appt so automatically approves expenses that month

I agree with this. Good luck Op.

She didn't do the mileage it was booked and then cancelled, but the mileage still claimed by the system and should have been manually cancelled when the trip didn't actually happen. I assume a whole set of appointments are set up registered on the system in advance and costed automatically, but late cancellations have to be manually entered or they are assumed to have happened.

Sounds like you've been set up to fail, that's not a good system.

Are you part of a union?

Please don't think colleagues will be thinking badly of you, many people will understand that expenses are tricky.