S'pore tribunal awards woman S$30,000 for company's wrongful probation dismissal

A woman who was dismissed during her probation period has been awarded S$30,000 by the Employment Claims Tribunal.

Tribunal Magistrate Joel Tan found that her employer had not proven she fell below its own performance standards, according to a grounds of decision published on Jul. 28.

The woman had been hired as a regional internal control audit manager on Apr. 21, 2025.

Her gross monthly salary was S$11,500.

She was let go on Oct. 16, 2025, shortly before her six-month probationary period ended.

She was told her performance had not met the standards required for confirmation.

Her last day was Oct. 31, 2025.

Both parties are anonymised in the judgment.

What the employer said

The company maintained the dismissal was based solely on performance, pointing to a probation evaluation form in which the woman had scored 71 per cent against a required threshold of 80 per cent, and received an average competency rating of 2.4 out of five against a required three.

The company said the targets and goals had been clearly communicated to the woman.

Her side of the story

The woman raised three grounds for her claim.

She said the poor performance allegations were not substantiated, and that her inability to understand Korean had played a role in her dismissal.

She claimed that key discussions among senior colleagues were frequently conducted in Korean, excluding her from conversations that shaped performance expectations.

She also argued the dismissal was retaliation for what she described as “whistleblowing”.

She had raised concerns about a proposed restructuring of the company's internal audit function, which she believed created a self-review threat inconsistent with audit principles.

The woman, who had 15 years of audit experience, told the tribunal she had anticipated that her supervisor would find fault with peripheral matters rather than the quality of her audit work, and that she felt her supervisor was "evaluating [her] at the wrong side of the audit table".

What the tribunal found

On the competency ratings, the magistrate found that the reporting supervisor had given below-average ratings of two across six of 10 competencies, but never explained to the woman what she needed to do to pass, and had not carried out any of the periodic documented reviews that the company's own probation process required.

Critically, the justification column on the evaluation form was left entirely blank across every entry. The only explanations offered were given verbally at the hearing.

The magistrate found the oral justifications did not withstand scrutiny, describing them as the supervisor's impressions dressed up as a suitability review.

The same problems arose with the performance goals.

The woman received her first formal feedback on her performance goals on Oct. 16, 2025, the very same day she was told she had failed probation.

In one instance, the supervisor had doubled the weightage of a goal from 10 per cent to 20 per cent without telling the woman, after reassigning a separate task to another employee.

The magistrate concluded that an employer who never made its standards clear could not then use an employee's failure to conform to those standards as evidence that they were unsuitable, noting that not knowing a standard and being unable to meet it were two different things.

The tribunal ruled in her favour on the performance ground alone, which was sufficient to decide the case.

It found the language discrimination and whistleblowing claims unproven on the evidence.

The award

The tribunal found she would have remained employed for at least a further three months had she not been wrongfully dismissed, which would have placed the full award at S$34,500.

However, the prescribed claim limit constrained the award to S$30,000.

The magistrate awarded the maximum permissible sum, along with S$300 in costs and S$60 in disbursements.