http://qvisory.org/posts/what-to-do-when-you-re-accused-of-criminal-wrongdoing-at-work.xml Fri, 16 May 2008 17:52:37 GMT http://qvisory.org/posts/what-to-do-when-you-re-accused-of-criminal-wrongdoing-at-work#comment_397 Interesting post but really scary! What happens if your boss accuses you of a crime, you get a lawyer, and you're off the hook? Does your employer have to pay for all the costs of the lawyer? It seems like that would be really unfair if you had to pay (thousands? Hundreds of thousands?) of your own money to prove that you were innocent. Fri, 16 May 2008 17:52:37 GMT http://qvisory.org/posts/what-to-do-when-you-re-accused-of-criminal-wrongdoing-at-work#comment_397 Sean Jameson http://qvisory.org/posts/what-to-do-when-you-re-accused-of-criminal-wrongdoing-at-work#comment_407 Sadly, the odds are that even in this "worst-of-all-possible worlds" scenario -- the innocent employee wrongly accused, personal resources squandered, name dragged through the mud -- you're not going to have any meaningful recourse. The problem is that in most (if not all) states, you can't sue someone for making a report to the police unless that person KNEW what they were saying was a lie -- and in some states, you can't sue even then. So if your boss simply reported his/her suspicions to the police, there is almost certainly nothing you can do about it legally, however unfounded those suspicions turn out to be. If you ended up in legal trouble not because your boss reported you to the police, but because your boss said bad things about you to third parties, who then relayed those accusations to the police, you might have a legal action for "defamation" against the person or people who bad-mouthed you, but such cases are notoriously difficult to win. In particular, you have to show that these people made specific untrue statements of fact -- e.g., "Sean took money from petty cash" -- not merely derogatory statements of opinion, "Sean is a dishonest rotter." It's common for an employee in this situation to hear at second- or third-hand that his/her former boss is bad-mouthing him/her to (for example) prospective future employers. Trying to get anyone to confirm "on the record" what they heard the former boss say is a hard-to-impossible task, however, and the pursuit of such "verification" is almost always fundamentally incompatible with the laid-off employee's true goal, which is to get another job. So, as a practical matter, an employee to whom this happens is likely to have no decent option other than to lick his/her wounds and struggle forward. I don't like it either, but that's the way it is. Mon, 19 May 2008 09:09:16 GMT http://qvisory.org/posts/what-to-do-when-you-re-accused-of-criminal-wrongdoing-at-work#comment_407 Dmitri Iglitzin http://qvisory.org/posts/what-to-do-when-you-re-accused-of-criminal-wrongdoing-at-work#comment_506 What recourse does an employee have if there was an accusation and HR did an "investigation" and found you to be innocent. HR also stated that no one else would be made aware of the acusation. However you think that your new manager has been told because they are suddenly doing things that indiacte they do not trust you. Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:43:12 GMT http://qvisory.org/posts/what-to-do-when-you-re-accused-of-criminal-wrongdoing-at-work#comment_506 Jane Doe http://qvisory.org/posts/what-to-do-when-you-re-accused-of-criminal-wrongdoing-at-work#comment_519 Well, basically, you're screwed. This falls into that awful gray area where bad things are happening to you, but those things are neither overt enough to prove nor adverse enough to be legally actionable. Any efforts you make to "verify" your suspicions or disabuse your manager of his or hers of you -- such as, for example, asking your new manager, "are you aware I was accused of stealing office supplies and trading them for drugs?" -- will simply amplify the problem. As I see it, you have two choices: (1) try to wait it out, hoping that after a while, when nothing untoward happens, your new manager will realize that you actually ARE trustworthy, or (2) jump from here to http://qvisory.org/posts/give-your-resume-a-makeover and http://qvisory.org/posts/tips-for-rocking-your-r-sum and start brushing off your resume. There may be a third solution, but I can't think of one. Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:56:35 GMT http://qvisory.org/posts/what-to-do-when-you-re-accused-of-criminal-wrongdoing-at-work#comment_519 Dmitri Iglitzin