Deloitte refusal to confirm employment termination – impact on income protection insurance claim

xapprenticex

Paul_DNAP wrote: »

Write a letter to Deloitte saying that if they won't confirm that his employment was ended then your hubby will assume that he must therefore be still employed by them and he will be taking them to the small claims court for unpaid wages forthwith.

loooooooool :money:

neilio

So, as expected, the insurance company has told my husband that they will need to contact Deloitte to obtain details of why he was terminated. He told them that Deloitte will probably not provide them with anything. When asking what this means for his policy, Cigna has been quite vague about what would happen next.

It may be clutching at straws but he has now contacted Deloitte requesting information from his personnel file under the Data Protection Act 2018 and GDPR. He has asked for minutes of the meeting at which he was terminated (he still has the meeting interview that says someone from HR would be taking notes, someone did take notes, but he never received those) and also asked for a letter confirming that they terminated him. We don't know what the outcome of this will be, but some research online revealed to me that employers are to provide any information on employees if requested under this legislation. So we'll see.

Meanwhile, I should mention at this point that he has been keeping in touch with a former colleague from Deloitte who was also terminated under similar circumstances at the same time after having worked there for less than two years. This person's situation is that he has been unemployed for a whole year since (hasn't been able to find a job, I don't know why), but now has a job offer from an employer who has an external agency to conduct referencing and background checks. They are looking into why he was out of work for a year and they need something from Deloitte stating why he was terminated but, surprise surprise, he doesn't have a letter either! He hasn't attempted the GDPR route like we have (yet) but has so far been told by Deloitte that they do not have on record any reason why he was terminated. This could potentially hinder him being able to start working again at his new job.

It is absurd, frankly. How are people supposed to protect themselves in such investigations without a simple confirmation from a former employer who terminates staff after under two years of employment? It's as if they are deliberately making this difficult for my husband and his friend, and for what reason?

neilio

I hadn’t responded specifically to what the terms of the policy say because he had been paying into it for such a long time that we couldn’t locate the policy documents. After requesting them, Cigna has now sent the documents. It says that he is not covered if he is terminated within 120 days of starting the job (which doesn’t apply because he worked there for 18 months) or if he committed gross misconduct (which he didn’t) or if he willingly resigned (which he didn’t). There are also various other terms which don’t apply to him such as being caught up in war, revolution and natural disasters, etc. Ergo, he is covered, so long as he can prove that Deloitte terminated him, which is proving difficult because Deloitte is refusing to provide any written acknowledgement of what happened. It appears that nobody has any real protection or assurance in the workplace when under 2 years of employment somewhere.

neilio

Update on this for anyone still interested.

After putting in what we thought may have been a futile request under the Data Protection Act 2018 and GDPR at the end of August, we finally have good news.

Deloitte, of course, did not respond to the GDPR request for his file right away. Nor were they responding to any of Cigna's direct requests for information.

He called Deloitte two days ago to chase up his request. The HR person he spoke to could see on file there were "several" outstanding actions on his file, probably as a result of his and Cigna's repeated requests for information, and he was told that it would be raised to this HR person's manager.

Then, out of the blue today, Cigna contacted him to announce that Deloitte had been in touch with them, and they would be paying out for the full claim on the policy. So, it has come to a satisfactory conclusion. He hasn't received anything directly from Deloitte, but that doesn't matter anymore as we have reached the desired outcome and a line can be drawn under this. We wonder if, eventually, someone at Deloitte HR looked at what was being requested and someone finally just came to the decision to provide Cigna with the satisfactory information for the insurance claim without providing my husband with actual evidence of why he was terminated. We're still not sure what they are trying to protect themselves from if they were within their legal right to terminate employment.

The lesson learnt from this is that if anyone is to find themselves in a situation like this when being terminated from a job, then demand minutes from any meetings or a letter stipulating the outcome. I still wonder how this may affect someone who might have had to sign on at the Jobcentre, for example.