Employment law SOS: alleged victims of theft

It would be unusual for an employer to be held responsible for the theft of an employee's personal property from their place of work. Even if it were established that a colleague stole the goods, you would not be held vicariously liable for their criminal actions as these clearly fall outside the scope of their employment duties. You took reasonable steps to ensure employees' personal belongings were secure by providing lockers. Unless there had been previous incidents of lockers being broken into, it would be hard to see that the employee could argue that you had been negligent in any way. Many employers explicitly seek to waive potential liability for loss or damage of employees' personal goods by displaying notices to this effect on their premises or including such provision in their employee handbook or standard terms and conditions of employment. Notwithstanding the question of liability for the employee's loss, you should investigate the incident. Take a statement from the employee. Do you have any CCTV monitoring in place which might be able to corroborate the allegation and/or identify a potential culprit? Make reasonable enquires as to whether anybody else witnessed anything. Encourage the employee to report the incident to the police. He will probably need to do this in any event if he intends to make a potential claim against a personal/household insurance policy. If the employee is reluctant to report the matter himself, you might decide to do so in any event, as the allegation is about criminal activity taking place on your premises. If your investigations reveal reasonable grounds for suspecting another employee is guilty of theft, you should commence disciplinary proceedings in accordance with your disciplinary policy. Your policy should list theft as an act of gross misconduct which could result in summary dismissal.