Some useful pointers for employers in the handling of protected disclosures, courtesy of the EAT’s recent decision in Argence-Lafon -v- Ark Syndicate Management Limited, a sad example of what happens when an employee lets his unshakeable belief in his own rightness cost him his sense of perspective and ultimately his job.
As almost always with whistleblowing cases, the alleged wrongdoing is greatly less interesting than what happened subsequently. In brief, AL worked for an insurance syndicate in the energy and resources field. A claim was made by an insured party for a tidy $53m following an underground blow-out incident at an oil drilling well. Ark took the view that the incident was covered by insurance and therefore that the claim was legitimate, but AL considered that it was fraudulent, and that the support of Ark’s management for the claim meant that they were in on it too. When he first raised this challenge, he was encouraged by his management to escalate it. If he was right, after all, there was a whopping saving to be made. Ark considered the relevant facts again at AL’s request and reached the same conclusion – so far as anyone there could tell, the claim was legitimate. Unpersuaded, AL continued to agitate and an external expert was commissioned who said the same thing, then followed at AL’s insistence by another who did the same. There was no evidence found to support AL’s allegations of fraud, not on the part of the insured company and still less on the part...
When examiners don’t get veterans’ records, bad decisions aren’t a mistake—they’re a systemic failure. In a blistering oversight hearing this week, members of Congress openly questioned whether th...