HMRC ORDERED TO PAY WORKER £16,506 OVER FABRICATED COMMENTS

An employment tribunal has ordered HM Revenue and Customs to pay an Armenian trainee more than £16,500 after finding her manager fabricated claims that she wanted to "kill Russians for killing her family". The tribunal heard the woman, known only as Ms X, never made such comments about Russians. It found her manager, Damian Robson, invented the remarks in notes from a private meeting with her. A later appeal made matters worse, after an inexperienced officer wrongly concluded she had said she wanted to "kill Russians" because she was "medically paranoid". HMRC was ordered to pay her £16,506.95 in compensation.

Ms X is from Abkhazia, a semi-autonomous region of Georgia, and is fluent in English but speaks Russian as her first language, with a Russian accent. She was granted asylum in the UK in 2004 and later became a naturalised British citizen. She first worked for HMRC in 2019 before returning as a trainee in July 2022, when Mr Robson became her line manager. He described himself as "an empathetic and relaxed manager", but the tribunal found his emails to Ms X were "patronising", "hostile" and "inappropriate". She had changed her distinctive surname in 2019 on police and legal advice, after a violent attack linked to her Armenian identity, only to find it still visible to all 65,000 HMRC staff on the internal system.

The tribunal found that the false allegation against Ms X was not corrected but made worse as it moved through HMRC's disciplinary and appeal procedures. It criticised both Mr Robson's conduct and the appeal officer's handling of the case. Ms X had raised her surname concerns directly with Mr Robson before the disciplinary process began. HMRC must now pay her the full compensation award of £16,506.95.