Sacked: £69,000 incinerator manager bunked off to go swimming

Thursday 15 January 2015

A senior project manager at the incinerator was sacked for gross misconduct after being caught falsifying his time sheet to cover up the fact that he was going swimming at lunch time.

The senior manager – named as I Coupland in court papers – was fired at the end of November after an investigation found that he had scribbled out records in the site diary, and claiming that he had only been out for 30 minutes for “a token lunch”.

But an investigation found that actually, Coupland had been “blatantly trying to abuse the system” –and that on one occasion, he had gone home after attending a course and then emailed an administrator in the office asking them to change the record to show that he had worked until 6 pm.

The tribunal heard that Coupland – a Chartered Engineer who was earning between £60,927 and £69,811 in his Grade 13 role – had been misusing the system for “one or two years”.

The case only came to light because after being sacked at a hearing for having “wilfully changed records”, Coupland took the States to an employment tribunal claiming that he had been unfairly dismissed.

He said that he had worked more hours than he had to, and that the States could not prove that he had been going swimming – which he said helped him to think – on every occasion that CCTV showed him leaving his place of work.

But Advocate Lee Ingram, who represented the States in the case, said that what mattered was that Coupland had misused the system, and covered up for his own benefit.

The tribunal rejected that claim, saying that his evidence to them was unconvincing – and that he could not back up his claim to have had a “compulsive nature” with evidence from a doctor, as he had said he would do.

They found that Coupland’s actions were “a fundamental breach of contract which constituted an act of gross misconduct”, and that his dismissal was fair.