‘CONCERNED’ | 

Applegreen manager sacked after ‘ghost employee’ probe found worker went unpaid for months

“I just found out she hadn’t been paid for a long period of time. I’d never come across someone who hadn’t been paid for a 16-week period.”

Today at 09:09

An Applegreen service station manager was sacked after a suspected “ghost employee” on its systems turned out to be a real Polish woman with limited English who had had spent four months working without wages, the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) has heard.

A barrister acting for the chain said that the manager of its service station at Ashbourne, Co Meath, had effectively inflated profits for 2021 by not registering the worker for payroll – and secured himself an increased bonus worth €2,000 gross as a result.

The manager, site director Graham Price, has accused Petrogas Group Ltd, trading as Applegreen, of breaching the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 and the Minimum Notice and Terms of Employment Act 1973 by sacking him for gross misconduct following an investigation into the matter.

His lawyers maintain the delay in “onboarding” the worker was because she had no PPS number when she was hired in October 2021 and that her application to register had been affected by a backlog in issuing them in the wake of the cyber-attack on the HSE the previous May.

Giving evidence to the tribunal last Friday, an Applegreen regional manager, Keith Ennis, said he had gone to the Ashbourne service station in February 2022 to carry out an audit and discovered discrepancies between its point-of-sale system records and the payroll report for the period.

“Basically what I’m checking is, are all the employees on our till system for a period of time; were they actually in work at the time? It’s to check for ghost employees,” he told adjudicator Brian Dalton.

“When this was uncovered I asked, I think, the assistant manager who was there conducting the audit with me: ‘Where is this lady? Is she OK?’”

“Why were you concerned?” asked the group’s barrister Hugh O’Flaherty BL, who appeared instructed by solicitor David O’Riordan.

“I just found out she hadn’t been paid for a long period of time. I’d never come across someone who hadn’t been paid for a 16-week period.

“By all accounts this could have been a ghost employee. I’d never heard of this lady before, except she’s on a point-of-sale till login, but not connected to payroll,” he said.

She was available; she had really poor English… it was a really broken English conversation, but I had verified it was a person.”

The tribunal heard that that the worker left the job shortly after receiving her back pay, an “onboarding ticket” – the company’s system for registering new staff having been submitted from the service station to the payroll department on January 25, 2022.

Mr Ennis conducted an investigation into the matter on foot of the audit and put various allegations to Mr Price, including failing to correctly conduct the “onboarding” of the worker, failing to keep statutory working time records and “budget misappropriations” for 2021 and 2022 leading to financial gain.

He added that the disciplinary process and appeal hearing “barely merit mention as part of a fair procedure”.

The matter was adjourned to a future date by adjudicating officer Brian Dalton.

Mr Ennis is to continue giving evidence on the next occasion and be cross-examined on his testimony, while Mr Price is expected to give his evidence at a later stage in the proceedings.