A club manager who arranged with the club’s payroll clerk to add overtime to her own pay, an amount the club put at $32,285 gross over a little more than seven months, was validly dismissed for serious misconduct, the Fair Work Commission has found. Commissioner Sloan held that the dismissal was consistent with the Small Business Fair Dismissal Code (which, if complied with by a small business employer, means the dismissal cannot be unfair) and dismissed the application under section 394 of the Fair Work Act 2009.
$32,285gross overtime the club alleged the manager received between 10 December 2023 and 21 July 2024
The applicant had worked at the club since 2019, starting as a casual employee before permanent appointments as Bar Manager and then Club Manager. Her contract provided a salary of $65,000 inclusive of a 20 per cent management exemption rate under the Registered and Licensed Clubs Award 2020, which excluded her from overtime and most penalty rates. She came to believe she was underpaid, contending her role was misclassified at Level 6, which applies to managers of clubs with gross annual revenue under $500,000. She produced financial reports showing club revenue of $585,583.31 in the year ended 30 June 2021 and $529,352.75 the following year, evidence the Commissioner said the club “did not directly or effectively controvert”.
After the clerk obtained external advice in December 2023, the manager’s weekly pays began to include overtime. The Commissioner found the decision was made jointly but “ultimately sanctioned” by the manager, who signed off each week on her own payments. There was no evidence either had communicated the arrangement to the board, which first learned of the payments in October 2024. The club dismissed the manager on 23 June 2025, electing to pay five weeks’ pay as an ex gratia payment (a voluntary payment the club was not legally required to make) despite treating the conduct as serious misconduct justifying dismissal without notice.
She was underpaid and misclassified under the Award, the board had repeatedly rebuffed her requests for a review of her contract and remuneration, the contract was consequently “null and void”, and the dismissal process lacked fairness, integrity, transparency and impartiality.
It was a small business employer with six employees, it had complied with the Code, and the substantiated allegations, viewed individually or together, gave it reasonable grounds to believe the manager’s conduct was sufficiently serious to justify immediate dismissal.
The club genuinely believed the conduct justified immediate dismissal and held that belief on reasonable grounds after a reasonable investigation. The unauthorised overtime alone was enough; the applicant knew the board would not approve the payments and had other avenues open to her, including her union, the Fair Work Ombudsman and a dispute notification to the Commission.
Applying the Full Bench tests in Pinawin and Ryman v Thrash, the Commissioner noted the Commission was not required to determine whether the manager was in fact underpaid or whether the employer’s belief was correct, only whether the belief was genuinely held on reasonable grounds. On that footing the overtime arrangement was fatal to the claim. Commissioner Sloan said of the applicant:
“Her conduct was deliberate and has the air of subterfuge about it. She was the most senior employee of the Club.”
The club fared far worse on the other allegations it had put to the manager, which ranged from working on rostered days off to failing to formalise staff contracts and emailing all directors instead of communicating through the then board chair. Commissioner Sloan described the two communication allegations as “storms in a teacup” and found that, without the overtime allegation, the remaining allegations did not, individually or collectively, give the club reasonable grounds for its belief. The evidence created the “distinct impression” that, having discovered the overtime payments, the club “threw everything it had” at the applicant. The Commissioner also observed that she “appears to have had reasonable cause to question whether she was receiving her Award entitlements”.
At a glance
- Parties: A former club manager v Burringbar District Sports Club Ltd
- Citation: [2026] FWC 476, Commissioner Sloan, 16 February 2026
- Section: s.394, Fair Work Act 2009; Small Business Fair Dismissal Code (s.388)
- Outcome: Application dismissed; summary dismissal consistent with the Code
- Who it affects: Small business employers relying on the Code
The decision confirms that under the Code a single substantiated allegation can sustain a summary dismissal even where every other allegation fails, and that the Commission assesses the reasonableness of the employer’s belief and investigation at the time of dismissal, not whether the underlying conduct is proved. For employers covered by the Code, compliance forecloses an unfair dismissal finding under section 385 regardless of how the wider disciplinary case would have stood up.
Source: [2026] FWC 476
From the OnNotice archive: this update was reported retrospectively as part of our corpus build-out, and is dated to the event it covers.
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