The employer waited two years to act - the worker argued that alone made her sacking unfair
An IT worker dismissed over dishonesty a court found in her own injury case has lost her bid to overturn the sacking.
The South Australian Employment Tribunal upheld the dismissal of a long-serving civilian employee of the state's police force, closing a disciplinary process that ran for more than two years. The decision, handed down on July 30, 2026, is a practical guide for any HR team weighing whether it can act on findings made in another forum - and how much of its own process it still has to run.
The worker, an IT project officer, had brought two workers compensation claims for physical injuries. A judge rejected both in April 2020 and found she had been deliberately untruthful in parts of her evidence, including withholding earlier symptoms linked to a private car trip and giving inconsistent accounts of her condition. A later decision ordered her to pay the employer's legal costs. She has consistently denied any dishonesty.
The employer treated those court findings as the basis for discipline. Its position was that a court had already determined the dishonesty question after hearing the evidence, so it did not need to investigate the same issue from scratch. It adopted the findings, assessed the conduct as a breach of the public sector code of ethics, and moved to sanction.
The tribunal accepted that approach was open to the employer - the first key point for HR. Where an...
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