Every so often a determination lands that should be read by every employer who has ever thought, “If I ever end up at the Authority, at least I’ll have the paper trail.” Mandeep Singh v PR Kahlon Limited [2026] NZERA 521 is that determination. On the facts, the employer looks close to unbeatable. It lost anyway. Understanding why is worth more than a shelf of policy templates.
Let me walk you through the record the Authority actually saw.
The case against the employee
Mr Singh was a delivery driver for PR Kahlon Limited, a Palmerston North contractor running freight for Mainfreight. From late October 2023, the company documented a steady run of performance concerns: incomplete deliveries, freight left unscanned, missing or invalid signatures, incorrect delivery details, and proof-of-delivery records that did not match where or when deliveries had actually happened. Then there was the driving. Site speed limits ignored. Freight damaged. Collisions serious enough to damage customers’ roofs, spouting, and concrete. Mr Singh admitted hitting a customer’s building, and admitted being banned from two customer sites for unsafe driving.
The company did not sit on its hands. It put him on a performance improvement plan, issued a written warning in November 2023, gave repeated hands-on training on the scanning equipment, put instructions in writing and in the group chat, asked him to repeat directions back, and issued a final written warning in May 2024. The Authority found all of this genuine and well-documented — it held there was sufficient evidence to justify the performance concerns, and that the company had investigated properly and raised its concerns before acting.
The wage claims Mr Singh brought in response did not survive contact with the evidence. He said he had been paid a flat 30 hours a week regardless of hours worked. The payslips said otherwise: of thirty-nine weeks in evidence, he was never once paid for 30 hours, his hours ranged from 35.5 to 47 a week, and he was paid for more than 40 hours in twenty-nine of them. His claim to have worked unpaid from July 2023 fell away when the records showed he could not lawfully drive until September. His unpaid-training and holiday-pay claims failed too.
And then the credibility problem. Mr Singh insisted his own vehicle logbooks were false — and, in the same breath, asked the Authority to rely on those same logbooks wherever they showed hours in his favour. The Authority put the contradiction to him directly; he could not explain it. (For what it is worth, the Authority also found the logbooks were not in fact falsified: recording driving time rather than every working hour is exactly what a vehicle logbook is for.) He had also handed his employer a completed vehicle-inspection form for an inspection he had never done — he was off work at the time, and his manager had inspected the vehicle himself.
Add it up. Valid, documented performance concerns. Admitted unsafe driving. Two site bans. Wage claims that collapsed. A witness whose own evidence contradicted itself. The Authority reduced Mr Singh’s remedies by 25 per cent for his own contribution to the situation. If you were scoring this on the facts, the employer is a long way ahead.
The employer still lost.
Where it went wrong
The dismissal was not about the dishonesty, and it was not about the logbooks. The termination letter put the ground plainly: the company could not, as it wrote, “compromise the Road safety of others” given the nature of the job. This was a performance and safety dismissal. On the substance, it was a defensible one.
It failed on process — and specifically on the two things a fair and reasonable employer is required to get right: giving the employee a real opportunity to respond, and genuinely considering what he has to say.
Here is the part every employer should sit with. In his own written evidence, the director who ran the process was sharply critical of Mr Singh’s English. He described the difficulty communicating in English, spoken and written, as one of his own concerns about keeping Mr Singh on, and called it “a significant barrier to safe and efficient performance”. The company knew, on its own account, that this man struggled with English.
Both men were fluent in Punjabi. Every warning, the performance-improvement documents, the final written warning, and the disciplinary case itself were put to him in English.
The Authority did not find that Mr Singh understood nothing — it found something more uncomfortable. He probably grasped that his employer had concerns. What he did not grasp was how serious they were, or that they could cost him his job. The message was sent. It was not, in any meaningful sense, received.
The second failure compounded the first. The final meeting on 10 June 2024 ended in the air. The director believed he had left the door open for the employee to come back with an explanation and a plan; the employee and his advocate did not understand that anything was expected of them. The Authority reviewed the correspondence and found the chance to respond had not been clearly expressed. On 18 June the dismissal letter arrived — noting, as a mark against the employee, that he had offered no plan and no comment.
He offered no plan because he did not know one had been asked for.
The lesson employers keep missing
Good faith in a disciplinary process is not only a question of whether you were right. It is a question of whether the other person understood you. You can hold every valid concern, paper every one of them, and still dismiss unjustifiably if the person on the other side of the table never truly understood what was at stake, or that his job was on the line.
This is not a call to lower the bar on genuine performance problems. Mr Singh’s driving was a real risk, and the Authority said so. It is a call to make the process do the job the law asks of it. Where an employer’s own evidence records that an employee cannot readily follow written English, running the entire disciplinary process in written English is not a technicality. It is the difference between a warning and a piece of paper.
Two smaller details are worth noting, because they recur in these files. When the Authority asked for the payslip proving the company had paid Mr Singh during his final week of “paid special leave,” the payroll system could not produce one — the record showed zero ordinary hours, and the Authority found he had not in fact been paid. And an interpreter was on hand for the Authority’s investigation meeting. The process that cost the man his job was run in English.
The bill for getting the substance right and the process wrong came to $24,627.32: $934.29 in lost wages, $10,121.48 for three months’ lost remuneration, and $13,500 for hurt and humiliation — each already cut by 25 per cent for his own contribution — plus $71.55 for the filing fee.
He did almost everything wrong. His employer still lost. Being right is not the same as being fair — and at the Authority, only one of those is a defence.
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Lex Praxis advises New Zealand employers on employment law, including disciplinary process, dismissal, and good-faith obligations. This article is general commentary and does not constitute legal advice. For advice specific to your circumstances, contact us directly.
Source
Relevant legislation
- Employment Relations Act 2000 (s 4 good faith; s 103A justification test; s 123 and s 124 remedies and contribution)
