6 people win compensation from company for wrongful dismissals over medical claims

She told the company’s disciplinary committee that she first learned about Clinic X from a colleague, who said that many employees went there and made claims for similar purchases.

She also said that the clinic’s personnel had advised her to keep each receipt below S$200, because amounts under that threshold did not need to be itemised for reimbursement. 

Ms C said she thought this meant that such claims were permissible.

She believed that her claims were consistent with prevailing practice and she had not intended to deceive her company. She also agreed to repay the full amount once informed that her claims were not in order, and she deeply regretted the lapse.

The disciplinary committee found that Ms C had made repeated claims for items that were “plainly non-medical” in nature and these could not reasonably have been regarded as “claimable” under company policy.

The committee noted that the pattern of her purchases – 62 transactions over seven months, typically just below S$200 – showed a “sustained and deliberate disregard” for the policy’s requirements.

It also found that there was a “serious breach of policy” and that Ms C had committed the breach “intentionally and dishonestly”.

It recommended that she be issued a letter of warning along with a “100 per cent reduction of her performance bonus for 2023”.

The company’s global head of human resources expressed concern that the finding of dishonesty was not consistent with such a lenient sanction and asked the disciplinary committee to reconsider its recommendation.

The committee reconvened within the day and revised its recommendation to termination. 

Ms C was issued a notice of termination the next day with three months’ notice.

However, about a month later, in May 2024, the company informed her that her employment would be terminated with immediate effect, with all sums due to her paid accordingly.

She later filed claims for wrongful dismissal, for compensation of about S$26,000, and payment for her performance bonus for 2023 in the sum of S$13,000.

She began searching for work and was candid at job interviews about the circumstances of her departure from her previous job, but remained unemployed until as late as August 2025.

TRIBUNAL’S FINDINGS

Mr Kang the magistrate said that the company had framed the termination of Ms C as misconduct aggravated by dishonesty, so the burden was on the company to prove it.

He noted that there was no indicator in the employer’s case that Ms C knew the claims were impermissible and she pressed on nonetheless. 

There was no acknowledgement of her having received training on submitting claims, no warning that she had accepted and ignored, no attempt at concealment and no admission.

The company’s approach also assumed clarity of policy at the time, but if this was so, the fact that a large number of financially literate workers made the same kind of counter-purchase claims would be surprising, Mr Kang added.

This was not a case of large, disguised benefits either, with the typical claim being “modest”, Mr Kang said.

Ms C had also submitted claims through ordinary channels using receipts and did not alter documents, backdate forms or seek to bypass checks. When the review flagged concerns, she accepted that there were no doctor consultations and offered to repay.

“Those were not the actions of an employee pursuing concealment; they fit an employee who believed she was within bounds and, once corrected, attempted to make amends,” Mr Kang said.

He added that the company’s disciplinary committee had given a characterisation of Ms C that “sat awkwardly with a finding of dishonesty”.

It recorded her as junior and “simple-minded”, following what she had been told by her colleagues and the clinic.

Mr Kang said the evidence did not show that Ms C was dishonest, reckless or wilfully blind. Instead, the evidence supported “a lesser wrong”, that she was negligently making impermissible claims by relying on practice rather than formal policy.

The magistrate pointed to the company’s evidence, which showed that people with broadly comparable spending patterns were not uniformly dismissed.

He said it was difficult to justify singling Ms C out for dismissal on a lesser basis, when others with similar conduct profiles received lesser sanctions.

He found that the company had not proven its case, and that although Ms C had committed the “lesser wrong”, it did not amount to just cause or excuse for dismissal.

Mr Kang awarded Ms C three months’ worth of income she would have earned had she not been dismissed, as well as a sum for harm caused by the wrongful dismissal.

He declined to award the performance bonus she sought, since it was discretionary and was not a contractual entitlement.

The total sum awarded to her came to S$17,332, on top of added costs and disbursements of S$1,070.

Mr Kang noted the law governing wrongful dismissals has “become a little more layered, difficult and unclear” than it needs to be.

This was after the Employment (Amendment) Act 2018 (Number 55 of 2018) was passed, and the jurisdiction to decide certain employee claims – including those involving pregnant employees – was transferred from the relevant minister to the Employment Claims Tribunals, and parliament chose to call the linked disputes “wrongful dismissal disputes”, he added.

This label, attached to two very different claims, has been the source of some conceptual confusion, which in turn produced a lack of clarity as to which principles and propositions of law both the Employment Claims Tribunals and the courts are to apply in deciding such claims, Mr Kang wrote in his judgment.

“In my view, the law needs clarification, especially given the high volume of ‘wrongful dismissal’ claims dealt with by the Employment Claims Tribunals and the corresponding risk of inconsistency a lack of clarity can create.”