Absenteeism Punishable By Criminal Law
Posted 17 September ,2010 in AIC Legal Services, Surveillance
absenteeism
Days lost due to Sickness or absenteeism for most companies is unavoidable in today’s society and there is a continual trend of more and more days lost to sickness. However, cases which we have proved where the employee has been putting in sick notes and getting full pay when they have had nothing wrong with them or they have been working for someone else nearly always get resolved with an internal discipline or dismissal.
Yet cases where employees have been stealing from the company and we have been able to prove and provide evidence normally end up with the Police involved and going to the Criminal Courts.
A.I.C Legal Services Ltd believe there is no difference as theft of hours is the same as theft of equipment or stock. We will be strongly recommending this to our clients in the coming year. Lets look at someone who has been off work for 6 months on full wages with Work Related Stress on an annual income of 20k. Lets say they have been investigated by us and we can prove beyond doubt they should be at work. So to start with that is £10,000 stolen from the company plus the wages for temp staff, the hours for HR to write to the member off sick, our costs, the discipline costs and perhaps Solicitor costs! Keep this figure in mind and then compare this to an employee who has stolen 20 pairs of Jeans from a warehouse where he is employed.
I know in nearly all the cases we have worked on the theft of jeans will be the one reported to the Police but in reality the most damaging and the most criminal offence is the theft of hours which amounts to theft of the company money.
By dismissing a fraudster for being off sick when they are not just means that some other company inherits his bad time keeping as a lot of the time the Data Protection Act 1998 protects what a previous Employer can write about that Employee and he can potentially have a clear CRB.
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