Sacking employee for one off error?

[14thDoctor]

How easy is it to do this? Employee has made a one off error that has cost business a huge amount of money. Otherwise their work is consistently at a good quality.

They have apologised but pointed out when the error was made they were new to the specific area of business and therefore having their work checked by another employee. It was not picked up on by the senior person checking.

They do however have the technical knowledge where it would be expected they would not make such a huge programming mistake. (Obviously so does the senior).

Where I work the checker has so much to check that your husband would look utterly out of touch/ careless if he made the argument of "someone should have checked". That's a process in place for the company to manage the risk of something long wrong, not HIS fall-back option or defence to make mistakes.

And I, as a senior, would be very concerned about anyone casually using that line if thought or defense. He really thinks he's in school where someone else is paid to correct his homework, that kind of vibe.

However, if he's normally good at his job they'd be stupid to fire him over it. Finding and training people takes infuriating levels of time and effort. He should show he understands the seriousness of the mistake, HIS responsibility in it, and that he will work with them to avoid a repeat.

This has pretty much just happened to a friend of mine, sacked for gross misconduct after accidentally failing to invoice some clients over a period of months. He recovered the money by invoicing once the error was discovered, but they sacked him anyway. He also had been there over two years.

As its a huge loss I assume.its a big company and insurance or similar kicks in.

The biggest risk is if there is a reputational risk and someone has to be seen to be the fall guy. Although in that case I imagine he would be paid out.

In my experience, significant errors at work are almost always due to cumulative mistakes. One person misunderstood something, someone else assumed something and a third person didn't have the right skills for example. Because checks ans balances are built in - for a single "mistake" to happen it's actually multiple mistakes along the line.

Many years ago I knew of a junior team member who booked the wrong currency for an import order and cost the company a significant amount as exchange rates fluctuated before the error was found. Even though two more senior people had countersigned the request the junior was disciplined, and subsequently lost their job . There may have been other minor performance issues which made them vulnerable to dismissal though.

The last few posts are a bit more worrying and makes it seem like dismissal is more likely. I will try and get him to think about a solicitor or something.
I am worried that he’ll never find another job if he’s fired. It will go on his references records. He’s the biggest earner by far so a real concern.

But what's the point of checking if the senior isn't actually checking for mistakes?

Surely seniors don’t check everything? I check our budget/account. I’m supposed to check 10% of entries/transactions. I usually do about 25%.

This feels so wrong, process wise. What about the senior employee who also didn't spot it?

They don’t check everything, no. They do check 100% of work done by people who are new to that specific task/ process. When the employee achieves competency they stop checking. This was the second project DH did for the company in that area. It 100% should have been checked and checked thoroughly.

That doesn’t absolve DH from making the mistake in the first place. He is being a flamingo about it.

Legal accountability is one thing - the senior person signing off the project is liable for it, in our case.

To spot-check employees for fraud, I guess.

To find patterns (which kinds of problems often occur, which mistakes do employees make, are the judgment calls made where/how we want them to be) and improve processes.

And because in theory (see: legal responsibility per above), the senior person is the one who should do the work. But we for example have 1 senior checking/guaranteeing the work of 20 members of staff - there is no way they would check 20 full timers in 1 working week, ever. And while yes, theoretically the seniors should 100% check the new colleagues in particular, the actual maths don't work out.

Either way, there is no way this system could work if the 20 people would have an attitude of meh I guess my best guess will do. So I would be a lot more worried about that than about mistakes. @14thDoctor

I haven't read the full thread. However, as he has been there three years he is protected against unfair dismissal. That doesn't mean they won't dismiss him, though. The fact that the senior person who checked his work missed the error suggests that dismissal due to this mistake would be unfair. They may offer him a settlement agreement. This would involve him agreeing to leave and not to take them to tribunal, in return for which he they would pay him some money - less than he would get if he took them to tribunal and won, but enough to persuade him that it isn't worth the risk.

If it looks like they are going to dismiss him without a settlement agreement, he needs to contact a lawyer who specialises in employment law. If your home insurance includes legal cover, they may be able the help.

Sorry I was trying to reply to HappySammy but can't figure out the replying feature.

That's because Mumsnet have made it very misleading. You can't reply directly to somebody. The best alternative is to quote the post you're replying to, which you do by clicking on the three little dots in the top right of the post and looking down the list of options that shows up. Or copy and paste the bit you want to reply to and put the username of the person who posted it, preceded by @. 'Reply' or 'Add message' just take you to the reply box, with no link to the specific post that made you want to reply. Confusing!

Nothing to add to your thread, OP, except just to wish you and your husband the best of luck dealing with this.

Dh obviously cant say "but senior should have checked" but the people there must know that.

I think if othwrwise a good employee who doesn't make mistakes then it may well be fine. Recruitment and training is a huge hassle.

You say he is burying his head but at this point stressing out is not helpful either, there isn't much to do but wait and see what they say. Hopefully disciplinary is soon.

Taking the personal out of it. I'm interested in @WonderingAboutThus viewpoint, as she is very Senior, but where is the Risk Assessment, Procedural Guidelines, Organisational and Operational procedures.

In finance it's easier. There are so many control procedures and checks. So many reconciliations and checks done, that any rare mistakes are picked up early, long before it gets to checking any Control Accounts.

Eg, there's about 3 checks that get automatically done before wages paid. Thus a pension error gets spotted way before any reconciling the Pension Control Account.

So yes, humble embarrassment might be the face for the meeting. Reassurance that this won't happen again. But in your back pocket (not necessarily a trump card you actually play yet) you try to take the personal out of it, do still know that actually there are organisational procedural issues at play here, aswell, or else this wouldn't have happened.

I too think he needs legal advice. And no more head sand burying.

Why a company that deals in a business where a mistake can cost hundreds
of thousands of pounds doesn't have a better checking and testing process...

Also I may be misreading but if it happened early on and he's now been there for ages it almost seems vindictive to go after him. He made a mistake, that is his fault (possibly). It's not his fault that it cost the company thousands nor that his
mistake wasn't spotted.

I'm an ex programmer of over 20 years. I'm repeating what some others have said. Everyone makes mistakes, which is why we have processes. In my last job to get a code change deployed it was a committee meeting (5 devs, 2 testers) to talk about the change, and the changes to automated and/or manual tests needed to test it, the programmer made the change, the tester created or updated tests, once the tests passed everyone met again to review the code and the tests and there might be changes and more testing out of that, then eventually the code would be accepted. At times it seems a bit overkilly, especially if only a single line of code was being changed, but having worked in places with minimal testing and the stress of yet another problem in a live system that needed everyone downing tools to fix it NOW I much preferred the "overkill" approach.

The company should have adequate steps and processes to make sure that hundreds of thousands of pounds cannot just be lost. Training or no, money to that scale should be subject to checks as standard.

Sorry, there wasn't much employment advice there, just empathy for the hapless programmer. I think it merits him calmly pointing out that there is a process error here, and dismissing him isn't going to solve that.

@WonderingAboutThus what kind of work do you do? In almost every job I've had where there are serious repercussions the work really was checked for errors. When I worked at a solicitors every single letter and email was read and approved by a partner before it went out. When I worked at a pharmacy, two people checked each prescription before it could be handed over to a patient. If my work had the potential to lose hundreds of thousands I'd be seriously concerned if it wasn't sense checked by someone else. The cost of employing someone full-time to check the work vs the financial and reputational cost of this one mistake seems to justify the cost.

@14thDoctor hope it all went OK today.

@HappySammy

High up in a consular department, where the (expat) consuls would be legally and politically responsible for any passports, visa, legalisations, emergency aid, judicial cooperation... delivered, but of course in big embassies we might have 20 staff to 1 consul and the consul also has a load of diplomatic tasks.

There just aren't enough staff or diplomats/consuls to do all the work with all the checks and balances done as well as you'd hope.

The consul would be the one brought into parliament if a big mistake occured (and presumably at some level the foreign affairs secretary).

If we had a local staff (f.e. visum agent) being careless and then say that the consul should have seen, that is kinda true, in theory, but it's wildly out of touch and it would be hard to keep on anyone you couldn't trust to understand they are supposed to do it.

If the staff made a mistake, even a serious one, the fault in itself would not make me inclined to advocate sacking them. It's hard to find staff. It's sometimes hard to be the staff. Everyone is human.

So the big mistakes would maybe not necessarily be money (though it can be - embassies do involve big amounts of money in sometimes foreign or dodgy countries!), but also things like accidentally delivering a passport to a minor that was in a custody battle/likely to be parentally abducted, not giving emergency aid fast enough OR giving it to a conman, given a visum to someone who shouldn't have gotten when and then commits a terrorist attack once they've gotten into the country,...

When is the meeting?

It would be a good idea for him to either take notes and quietly record it (phone in pocket).
Procesd failure is important and your DH should think on advance about what could be done differently so he is prepared and has a pov.

In my industry it would either be a warning
OR if employee was generally sub par we would have the warning meeting then might have a "conversation without prejudice".

In this meeting we'd basically offer a settlement package for them to sling their hook.
That's the point you bring your lawyer in and negotiate a bit more cash, wording of reference and leave quietly if you are smart.
The only person I saw whoever declined /fought it ended up going for gross misconduct 6m later.

If they offer settlement, take it.

OP is he a programmer? If so I have comments on the “checker” (reviewer) but only relevant if he is.