advice needed on disiplinary

Bushmanddan

Hi All

Sorry if i a ramble while writing this post. I have worked for my company for 7 years and apart from an absence issue have been a good employee. I had been signed off sick with my company for just over a year, initially with low mood be was subsequently diagnosed a as Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. I battled for a year to get over this returning to work a number of times during my illness. During one of these time when i returned to work, i made the mistake of setting up a payment system for one of our sites and using my account details while this site was being tested. This site was never finished and never fully launched and as far as i know shelved and never finsihed as i returned to sick leave. As it turns out due to the wonders of Google this site was found by a few of people who then used the sign up process to set up a monthly recurring payments of between £2 and £5. Unknown to me these monies were transferred into my account a various dates during the month. This account is not my main salary account but is heavily used for shopping so i constantly transfer small amounts into the account when going around the shops for milk and other small shops. For each transfer of money there was a receipt email sent to my work account which i no longer had any access to so hadn't spotted the receipt email either.

This carried on for December 2013 until October 2014, at this point following counseling and treatment i felt well enough to return to work, at this point i received a letter telling me that i am suspended from work pending an investigation meeting where they would ask me to give my account of the allegations. In this meeting freely admitted that the account setup was my doing, I had created this account during a period that i was severely affected by my illness and that had i had access to my email and seen the payments being sent that i would ave stopped them sooner as i had not meant to receive fund for the website personally. I have conveyed that i am very sorry and embarrassed that this has happened and that i am willing to pay back any monies i have wrongly received.

On Saturday i received a letter asking me to come to a disciplinary meeting this Friday to hearing the findings of the investigation with a view to decide where it is a mater of Serious or Gross misconduct. It also ask me to confirm in will attend and if i would like to call any witnesses. This i find impossible to do as i am not allowed to have any contact with staff at work and as i have been off for a year i don't even know if any staff members are still there to support me. The Staff member i created the site for left a good 6 months ago and i had only verbal conversations about the payment system. I do not feel that me attending the hearing would benefit me in my recovery as i feel that the only outcome for the hearing would be for me to be dismissed. At present i feel i should resign due to illness as work also have a letter from their occupation health team saying that if i go back to my current role they feel that it would cause to become ill again.

Any advice is welcome

ShadowPuma

"I do not feel that me attending the hearing would benefit me in my recovery as i feel that the only outcome for the hearing would be for me to be dismissed."

You were well enough to return to work before they suspended you. Playing this angle - even if it is true - is not going to go over well and will most likely result in dismissal more than attending the hearing.

Go through the bank statement with a fine tooth comb and work out all the transactions related to this and take that proof and go to the meeting.

If they do dismiss you or you DO want to resign work out an agreed reference that takes into account that this WAS all a mistake.

Bantex_2

How much have been paid into your account?

unlikelyheroine

I'm not sure I understand how the payments could have been made into your account. Why would you use your own bank details for a test, and how could people have found the details on Google, and why would they then make payments without themselves noticing they were going to the wrong place as in didn't they want a product or service they didn't get? I don't get it, but perhaps it makes more sense to your employers.

I agree with ShadowPuma.

jc808

Bushmanddan wrote: »

Hi All

Sorry if i a ramble while writing this post. I have worked for my company for 7 years have been a good employee...

apart from an absence issue - I had been signed off sick with my company for just over a year,

contradictory statements IMO, if your off sick that length of time, they would be lloking at getting rid

Air_Cooled_75

And nobody at work was checking your emails in your absence?

agrinnall

unlikelyheroine wrote: »

I'm not sure I understand how the payments could have been made into your account. Why would you use your own bank details for a test, and how could people have found the details on Google, and why would they then make payments without themselves noticing they were going to the wrong place as in didn't they want a product or service they didn't get? I don't get it, but perhaps it makes more sense to your employers.

Using your own bank details in a test system is probably not that unusual, you know for sure that the sortcode and account number are valid, I may even have done it myself in the dim and distant past. The question, which ties in to the rest of your questions, is how that test system ever made it into live when the OP believes it was shelved? Who made it live, and if that didn't happen, the business concerned must have appallingly bad security to allow a non-live system to interface to a live payment engine.

tea_lover

If you're not able to return to work the company are within their rights to look at dismissal from non-capability grounds. It would be better for your future prospects to go for this reason than to be dismissed for any sort of financial fraud or theft.

I think you've reached the point where you will be leaving the company one way or the other. Think about how you can manage that process on your own terms and at least come out of with an agreed reference.

TBagpuss

If you are not well enough to go to the office for the meeting you may be able to ask that it takes place at your home.

You may find it helpful to make detailed notes of what you did, when and why, so you can refer to these. For instance, the name of the person who instructed you to set up the payment site, when this was, etc.
Do you have access to your emails - did you inform him/her by emails that you had done it, and do you still have anything from them saying it was shelved.

i would alos try to go though your bank statements / paypal statements to identify exactly how much you received, so that you can provide this information and make a realistic offer about how quickly you can repay it.

It does seem odd that no-one was checking your emails if you were away for so long - were they not forwarded to someone else?

in terms of witnesses - have you already provided your medical evidence showing what you state of health was at the time all of this happened?