ALARM bells began ringing for a Scottish solicitor when he received his quarterly office telephone bill.
Now an industrial tribunal has found that he was entitled to sack an employee who made hundreds of personal calls from the office before going on honeymoon.
When Christopher Boyle, of CF Boyle & Co, Carlton Place, Glasgow, received his bill last
November, he discovered it was significantly higher than normal.
Twenty-seven-year-old Mrs Dawn Higgins, of Carlisle Road, Hamilton, ran the solicitor's office without supervision and was responsible for reception duties, secretarial work and
general office management.
After Mrs Higgins was involved in a name-calling incident with a trainee solicitor in June last year, both were given a verbal warning by Mr Boyle. The solicitor also issued a letter to Mrs Higgins which stated: ''From now on personal phone calls from the office will be made for good
reason only.
''Such calls will be recorded and brought to my attention. Any breach will result in a written warning with a view to dismissal. Equally, any incoming personal calls will go into the same category.''
Mrs Higgins, who got married last October, also had a father with a serious health problem and her employer appreciated that ''this was obviously a busy time for her''.
But when the telephone bill arrived, it was 30% higher than usual and Mr Boyle queried it with British Telecom, who issued an itemised breakdown of the calls.
The Glasgow tribunal, in its written judgement, noted: ''Mr Boyle was then in a position to analyse the traffic from his office.
''He was shocked at the large number of calls to specific telephone numbers which the lawyer suspected were friends and relatives of Mrs Higgins. Many of the calls were of lengthy duration and in the three-month period they amounted to more than 30 hours on the telephone.''
He challenged Mrs Higgins when she came back from honeymoon and she admitted making 250 calls and accepted she had also probably made a further 74.
Mrs Higgins accepted she had made no record of the calls and that they should have been brought to Mr Boyle's attention but in accepting she had done wrong she expressed ''surprise at the number and length of calls'' and offered to repay the cost. However, she was initially unwilling to identify some of the
numbers.
Mr Boyle decided to sack Mrs Higgins on 28 November last year as he no longer trusted her.
In rejecting the unfair dismissal claim the tribunal decided that a ''reasonable employer could reasonably have taken the decision to summarily dismiss in these circumstances''.
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