Inconsistent system for handling money at school not a basis to pin missing funds on employee: Arbitrator
A Manitoba employer didn’t have sufficient proof to justify firing an employee for theft of money that went missing under her care, an arbitrator has ruled.
Christine Dwyer was head secretary at a small Winnipeg school under the administration of the Winnipeg School Division. Her duties included a number of administrative tasks in the school office. She had some difficulties in her position at first, but she kept meticulous notes and worked with her boss, the district business administrator, to improve. Dwyer received a positive performance assessment in March 2011.
At the beginning of the school year, the school normally collects student fees for field trips and supplies. An educational assistant and a teacher collect the money in the gymnasium before the start of classes and take it to the office, where the head secretary checks the names off of a list and counts the money. The list is then used to create class lists for each teacher that indicates which students have paid. After the first day, teachers collect outstanding money, fill out deposit envelopes and return them to the head secretary, who double checks that the amount indicated on the envelope matches the amount in it. She then creates e-receipts within an e-fund to deposit the money in the bank.
Dwyer was not supposed to collect money from parents, but rather direct them to the appropriate teachers to make their payments. Nor was she supposed to rewrite deposit amounts on the envelopes — this had been made clear in her training. Dwyer had no prior experience in handling money.
The school had no safe, so Dwyer kept the envelopes with money in a locked drawer, for which she kept a ring of keys to lock it when she left. On her lunch breaks, student helpers would stay at the office desk.
In fall 2012, Dwyer asked the principal to lend her $400 to cover a daycare payment. The principal wrote her a cheque and Dwyer repaid her in cash the following week. It was the only time Dwyer asked to borrow money.
Missing money
In September 2012, one of the teachers received a printout of her accounts and saw that her class was credited with $475 paid. This didn’t seem right to her, so she went back and calculated what had actually been raised. She believed the amount should have been $586.
The teacher reported the discrepancy to the principal and was told the school would cover any supplies she needed to buy. The missing money was never found.
The district business administrator and an auditor were brought in to assess the situation, and they found undated and unsigned deposit envelopes that had been filled out by Dwyer and didn’t correspond to the e-receipts. However, they couldn’t determine whether Dwyer had taken any money, since different teachers had initially collected it and gave their envelopes separately to her.
The school division’s HR officer conducted a review and interviewed Dwyer. Class lists, e-receipts, and deposit slips were reviewed and the HR officer found a total of $2,268 was unaccounted for, including $610 which Dwyer had handled and issued manual receipts for or wrote on deposit envelopes herself. Dwyer couldn’t explain the discrepancy between monies recorded as received and the actual amounts deposited, but said she didn’t know what she received and she “just wrote what she was told to write.”
Dwyer also said she didn’t fully understand what she was doing and things were a mess, but didn’t admit to taking the money.
The school division didn't go to the police as it didn’t think it could get the money back. It also believed Dwyer stole all the money, but could only tie her directly to the $610 she handled and apparently didn’t deposit.
Some time passed and Dwyer was informed on Jan. 22, 2015, that she was being suspended without pay for six months. When she returned to work, she would be demoted to a lesser clerk position and placed at a location where she wouldn’t handle cash, and she wouldn’t be considered for a promotion for five years. In addition, she would have to complete a basic accounting course before being considered for a promotion.
The school division also required Dwyer to pay back the missing $610 linked to her.
Dwyer challenged the discipline issued to her, arguing there was no proof she was responsible for any of the money shortages and the system for keeping track of payments was flawed.
The arbitrator found that the school division’s case against Dwyer was based entirely on circumstantial evidence from school records, requiring a consistency between the circumstances and the alleged misconduct to effectively rule out any other conclusion.
The arbitrator pointed out that the school division issued a six-month suspension rather than termination despite the fact Dwyer denied stealing the money from the beginning. This was somewhat odd, since “a denial is usually taken as a strong indication of a lack of viability of a future ongoing employment relationship,” the arbitrator said.
In addition, the arbitrator called into question the strength of the school division’s convictions on the alleged misconduct since it only sought restitution of less than one-third of the money that it claimed Dwyer stole.
The arbitrator also noted that it took nearly two years for the school division to investigate and determine the discipline, which also raised questions about the school division’s certainty on Dwyer’s culpability.
Unreliable system
The arbitrator found that the process for submitting money to Dwyer with deposit slips and envelopes was not always followed and different people used different procedures. Given the number of incomplete deposit envelopes, multiple receipt books, and missing documents, it was difficult for the arbitrator to see how the school division arrived at the sum of $2,268 as the amount missing from the accounts, and also how it could be pegged on Dwyer. In fact, the school division really only pegged $610 of it on Dwyer, and that wasn’t definite due to the same documentation issues.
The arbitrator found Dwyer was straightforward with her answers, and although she couldn’t explain the discrepancies, she offered her best guess regarding inaccurate lists and receipts. In addition, she was overwhelmed with the financial aspects of her position, which could lead to mistakes. For example, she was given cheques covering students in multiple classes without instructions on how to break them down for the class lists and envelopes.
“I agree with the union that the system was broken from the beginning and it is hard to draw conclusions from evidence presented from this type of broken system,” the arbitrator said.
The fact Dwyer borrowed money shortly before the missing money was discovered didn’t mean much, as she paid it back the following week, the arbitrator found.
The Winnipeg School Division was ordered to rescind the suspension, remove it from Dwyer's employment record, and reimburse her for loss of benefits and salary.
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