Accepted redundancy settlement agreement, am now under investigation. Seek legal advice?

starrybear

Posting on behalf of my husband - hoping this is the right place.

He was offered an enhanced redundancy settlement package two weeks ago that he accepted last Friday. This was completely out of the blue and has knocked him for six.

During the last week, he wiped what he thought was all his personal documents from his laptop in preparation for handing his work equipment back.

However, his company have been in touch today to say that he's actually wiped documents etc from a shared drive. They haven't gone into detail about what they're missing, but have told him that his case is now sat with their legal team. Husband thinks they're implying that it was malicious.

By my husband's own admission, he isn't good with technology and this was an absolutely genuine mistake. He's in a fragile frame of mind, and just wasn't thinking straight. 

I'm assuming that their large IT team and framework should be able to recover what's been deleted (he doesn't even think he emptied his recycle bin - that's how unintentional it was, however, they've now locked him out of his laptop, so he can't check.)

He would have nothing to gain from such an act, and everything to lose, and he's a decent man - would never cause his team or wider group of colleagues the inconvenience of losing a load of information.)

I want to help him craft a letter to them outlining his standpoint and asking them to be lenient bearing in mind his frame of mind and also that he'd be stupid to do such a thing, when he stood to gain a decent financial cushion whilst looking for work.

My question is, before such a letter is sent to his employer (well, former), should we be seeking legal advice of our own, or would sending such a letter in the immediacy of this morning's phonecall, be a good idea?

He's in bits and I just want to help him navigate these next few days. Any advice will be gratefully received.

Hoenir

Does the employer have a strict policy on the personal use of work devices ?  

Wiping selected documents from a shared drive would be a specific act.  Be surprisinging if anyone would save personal documents there. 

Your husband needs to recall what he actually did.  As obviously the matter is extremely serious in nature. 

smartn2

I've worked in IT for almost 40 years and in my view if data has been wiped from a shared drive and its not recoverable from that drive by IT  the issue is more to do with poor backups and administration at the company than any individual.

Accidents happen all the time so for a company not to be prepared for this is more of an issue for them to resolve than for your husband to worry about. I'd ask them to prove the deletion was from his account and if they have this audited I'd be very surprised that there backups aren't in order also so it should be a non issue to recover the data.

Brie

What do you mean be "personal documents"?  Writing poetry or listing places to go on holiday?  Or a first draft of what he wants to say in his 1 - 1 or some other work doc?  If his poetry/whatever was on a shared drive then why haven't they mentioned it before?  It's either allowed or not and if it was ok before then it's not something they should be condemning him for now.  

And frankly I agree with the previous poster - back ups should be available.  That's why companies have IT support.  

Personally I would hold off sending them a letter of any sort until you hear more about the situation.  You could of course prepare something just so it's ready and then you can edit to suit their comments.  Having something prepped might also set your husband's mind at ease.

I might write something like:

I was surprised to get your communication stating documents had been deleted.  I was unaware if I was deleting something on a shared drive and thought anything I deleted was merely on my laptop hard drive.  I assume that your IT support team will be able to recover anything vital to the business - I certainly was not trying to remove anything of importance to you, just tidy away documents that were only relevant to me alone and are no longer required.  Rest assured there was nothing malicious in my actions.

bazdvd

a backup will more than likely be available but, I would also wonder if it was a deliberate act after being made redundant.
I am in no way saying it was deliberate but the company will have to investigate why it happened and the reasons behind it.

DullGreyGuy

starrybear said:

Posting on behalf of my husband - hoping this is the right place.

He was offered an enhanced redundancy settlement package two weeks ago that he accepted last Friday. This was completely out of the blue and has knocked him for six.

During the last week, he wiped what he thought was all his personal documents from his laptop in preparation for handing his work equipment back.

However, his company have been in touch today to say that he's actually wiped documents etc from a shared drive. They haven't gone into detail about what they're missing, but have told him that his case is now sat with their legal team. Husband thinks they're implying that it was malicious.

By my husband's own admission, he isn't good with technology and this was an absolutely genuine mistake. He's in a fragile frame of mind, and just wasn't thinking straight. 

I'm assuming that their large IT team and framework should be able to recover what's been deleted (he doesn't even think he emptied his recycle bin - that's how unintentional it was, however, they've now locked him out of his laptop, so he can't check.)

He would have nothing to gain from such an act, and everything to lose, and he's a decent man - would never cause his team or wider group of colleagues the inconvenience of losing a load of information.)

I want to help him craft a letter to them outlining his standpoint and asking them to be lenient bearing in mind his frame of mind and also that he'd be stupid to do such a thing, when he stood to gain a decent financial cushion whilst looking for work.

My question is, before such a letter is sent to his employer (well, former), should we be seeking legal advice of our own, or would sending such a letter in the immediacy of this morning's phonecall, be a good idea?

He's in bits and I just want to help him navigate these next few days. Any advice will be gratefully received.

Most firms prohibit the use of corporate devices for personal activities, they often turn a blind eye to the browsing the news on your lunch break etc but storing personal documents on its hard drive normally would go beyond what they are prepared to ignore. Have you checked their IT and InfoSec policies. 

Deleting documents on network drives or cloud storage is not the same as deleting them on your own computer. In many cases they won't go into your recycle bin. Some solutions do have its own recycle bin which may or may not be visible to a standard user. 

smartn2 said:

I've worked in IT for almost 40 years and in my view if data has been wiped from a shared drive and its not recoverable from that drive by IT  the issue is more to do with poor backups and administration at the company than any individual.

Accidents happen all the time so for a company not to be prepared for this is more of an issue for them to resolve than for your husband to worry about. I'd ask them to prove the deletion was from his account and if they have this audited I'd be very surprised that there backups aren't in order also so it should be a non issue to recover the data.

The devil is in the detail and it depends very much on what has been deleted. 

Assuming it's an old fashioned file server most places do daily backups which would mean yesterday's version can be reinstated but anything done to the file on the day would be lost. Probably irritating but not a major issue if we are talking about some Word documents etc but potentially a much more significant issue if they are one of the many firms that still use Access DB to store transactional data where the loss of a day's sales etc could be much more material a problem to identify what was sold to whom with no db. 

It may not actually be the loss of data thats the issue but more concern about the intent behind the deletion. Due process would normally be to cut off access and then investigate rather than allow them to continue having access whilst it's investigated. There are plenty of stories of disgruntled soon to be ex-employees intentionally deleting records, wiping servers with news articles claiming it cost the business 100k+ to deal with. 

DE_612183

how do they know he's deleted documents if they can't see them to be recovered?

wonder whether this is just posturing by the company to avoid a pay-out.

How "big" is this company?

smartn2

DE_612183 said:

how do they know he's deleted documents if they can't see them to be recovered?

wonder whether this is just posturing by the company to avoid a pay-out.

How "big" is this company?

It's possible there is an audit trail without adequate backups in place but if you've gone to the trouble of an audit trail you would normally have decent backups. DB's as mentioned above even with backups can be a pain to get back but end users shouldn't really have access to the database for file deletion anyhow.....

DullGreyGuy

DE_612183 said:

how do they know he's deleted documents if they can't see them to be recovered?

wonder whether this is just posturing by the company to avoid a pay-out.

How "big" is this company?

There are tools like Microsoft Purview which will log who's accessed, edited or deleted files. It itself won't help you recover it. 

Why do you assume they cannot recover them? The OP only stated they have accused him of deleting files inappropriately there was no comment that they cannot be recovered. 

DE_612183

smartn2 said:

DE_612183 said:

how do they know he's deleted documents if they can't see them to be recovered?

wonder whether this is just posturing by the company to avoid a pay-out.

How "big" is this company?

It's possible there is an audit trail without adequate backups in place but if you've gone to the trouble of an audit trail you would normally have decent backups. DB's as mentioned above even with backups can be a pain to get back but end users shouldn't really have access to the database for file deletion anyhow.....

From the info it sounds like a network drive or sharepoint - both of which should be easily recoverable ( depending on the company size and who manages their data storage ).

DE_612183

DullGreyGuy said:

DE_612183 said:

how do they know he's deleted documents if they can't see them to be recovered?

wonder whether this is just posturing by the company to avoid a pay-out.

How "big" is this company?

There are tools like Microsoft Purview which will log who's accessed, edited or deleted files. It itself won't help you recover it. 

Why do you assume they cannot recover them? The OP only stated they have accused him of deleting files inappropriately there was no comment that they cannot be recovered. 

Yeah, I get your point - but if the "case" is sat with a legal team ( which the OP has stated ) then you have to wonder what the problem is if they can recover them - as I said perhaps they've seen this as a way out of making the redundancy payment