A financial controller accused of making an unauthorised payment to the Australian Tax Office, a payment that turned out never to have happened, has won an unfair dismissal case after the Fair Work Commission found her employer never bothered to check its own facts.
What the Commission decided
Claudia Pun worked as Financial Controller for Health Care Providers Association Pty Ltd from August 2022, reporting to the CEO and Chief Operating Officer. In September 2025 she arranged an early morning payment to the ATO to make sure a new repayment plan did not fall over, not realising the ATO would separately process its own automatic payment the same day. The result was a duplicate payment, which Ms Pun flagged immediately and had refunded, with her boss even congratulating her on Slack once the refund came through.
Two months later, Ms Pun was called to a disciplinary meeting over two allegations: an unauthorised ATO payment said to have occurred on 20 October, and ongoing negligence in preparing tax liability figures in her reports. She was dismissed on 2 December 2025, with the termination letter claiming she had admitted to the allegations.
Commissioner Connolly found there was no evidence a payment was ever made on 20 October at all, and that the company had never checked basic records that would have shown this. The Commissioner also found the claims about her accepting the allegations in the disciplinary meeting were not supported by the actual transcript of that meeting. Evidence about the reporting allegation was similarly thin, with the company's own witnesses giving inconsistent accounts of when and how often Ms Pun had supposedly been told to include tax liabilities in her reports.
What was actually in dispute
The central fight was whether the misconduct alleged against Ms Pun had actually happened. The Commissioner held that neither allegation was established on the evidence, meaning there was no valid reason for the dismissal. The company's CEO conceded he had not even read the termination letter before it was sent, and its Chief Operating Officer put the errors down to typing mistakes.
The Commission did accept two lesser matters counted against Ms Pun: she had not obtained explicit sign-off for the September payment, and she had secretly recorded her disciplinary meeting. Neither was found serious enough to justify dismissal on its own, but both were treated as misconduct that contributed to the employer's decision.
Ms Pun did not seek her job back, accepting the relationship had broken down beyond repair, so the dispute moved to compensation. The Commissioner found she would likely have remained employed for a further six months given her competence, and calculated lost earnings on that basis. That figure was then reduced to account for her own misconduct, before superannuation was added to the final order.
What this means
The decision is a reminder that an employer relying on misconduct to justify a dismissal must actually be able to prove the misconduct occurred, not merely assert it. The Commission's approach to valid reasons and procedural fairness is discussed further at /unfair-dismissal/summary-dismissal/, and the method used to work out financial loss in cases like this is explained at /unfair-dismissal/compensation/.