Employer expected employee to pay back almost $2,000 lost from erroneous transactions
This instalment of You Make the Call features a transit fare collector who messed up debit card transactions that lost her employer money.
The fare collector worked for the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) collecting fares in a subway station ticket booth. The employee had worked for the TTC for 14 years, but had only been a collector for 10 months when, on Oct. 27 and 28, 2008, she sold nine metro passes but incorrectly processed the transactions. Instead of deducting the amounts from the customers’ bank accounts, the collector mistakenly credited their accounts with the same amount. Each pass was worth $109, so the total loss to the TTC was $1,962 — $981 for the value of the passes and $981 credited to the bank accounts. After the payment processor was notified of the errors, it was able to collect $218 from one customer.
The employee was initially dismissed for the error, but the TTC reached a settlement where the employee would be reinstated without acknowledgment of fault if she repaid the amount lost.
However, the union grieved the settlement, arguing the employee didn’t receive adequate training in debit and credit card transactions and there was no manual in her ticket booth, so the TTC had some responsibility in the losses from the flubbed transactions. Therefore, the employee shouldn’t bear the full financial burden.
The TTC pointed out the collected agreement had a policy indicating that fare collectors were “responsible for commission funds that are placed in their care or to which they have access. It is understood and agreed that the employee will repay to the commission any shortages in such funds on demand and it is a condition of continued employment that the employee sign an agreement to that effect.” It also argued the employee had successfully processed numerous debit and credit card transactions earlier in the year and should have known how to do them by that point.
You Make the Call
is the employee responsible for the money lost from her mistakes?
OR
Should the employer absorb the loss?
If you said the employee should not have had to make up the money, you’re right. The arbitrator acknowledged that the employee’s prior successful experience with debit and credit card transactions demonstrated she had sufficient training to perform the task. He also noted the employee had a manual in her car, so if she really needed one she could have gotten it. The evidence showed she also didn’t carefully check the debit slips, showing a reckless negligence that warranted discipline — a four-day suspension was deemed adequate.
“Issuing metro passes and the like are important sources of revenue for the (TTC) and there is a high duty of care on collectors who are responsible for processing financial transactions on behalf of the (TTC),” said the arbitrator. “The (employee) did not take sufficient care bearing in mind the responsibility she had as a collector. She was negligent in performing her work.”
However, the arbitrator looked at the standard procedure when a transaction error is made and found the TTC and its payment card processor had responsibilities as well. Normally, when a transaction error is found, the TTC notifies the processor and the processor sends a “good faith collection letter” to the customer’s bank asking for help contacting the customer for authorization to debit her account, which was done for the one customer who returned the money.
However, the processor did not follow up with the other customers’ banks after receiving no response to the initial collection letters, and there was some confusion over whether all the letters had been sent and when. The TTC also did not follow up after the initial notification of the transaction errors.
