The Danger of Ignoring an Investigation Report

Most employers who lose an unfair dismissal case lose it because their investigation was thin. Heston MRO Pty Ltd lost for the opposite reason. Its investigation was careful, methodical and properly reasoned. The problem was what the company did with it.

The investigation report cleared an aviation engineer of any misconduct. It recorded no adverse findings and no observations. The Head of Quality and Safety reviewed it and agreed. The CEO signed it. The company sent it to the customer Airline.

Four weeks later the engineer was dismissed for a reckless violation.

On 31 July 2026 Commissioner Simpson found that dismissal unfair and ordered the company to pay the employee $41,203.65 plus superannuation. Khan v Heston MRO Pty Ltd [2026] FWC 2008 is a case about what happens when an employer treats its own investigation report as a starting position rather than a finding.

The incident and the investigation report

Mr Khan was a Licenced Aircraft Maintenance Engineer. On 2 November 2025, an Airbus A350 operated by the airline threw repeated fault diagnostic messages. Mr Khan spoke to the pilots, and it was agreed he would power the aircraft down and power it back up to clear the fault. Four of the messages cleared. The flight departed 17 minutes late. Singapore Airlines asked that Mr Khan be removed from handling its aircraft.

Ms Lindsay-Ann Dickson, the Deputy Quality and Safety Manager, investigated. She worked through the Just Culture decision tree as it is designed to be worked through, and her evidence set out each step. The decision tree gave her an answer. This was an error, not a violation, and no blame attached. Her investigation report recommended clearer instructions and sharing guidance with the other engineers. Mr Andrew Lockett, then Head of Quality and Safety, reviewed it and agreed with the outcome. Ms Asta Zirlyte, the CEO, signed it. On 5 November 2025 it went to the airline.

That is a properly conducted investigation. Three levels of the organisation put their name to it.

What happened to the investigation report next

The Airline rejected it. The evidence at the hearing was that the airline considered the report an engineer-friendly account, built on conversations rather than on the aircraft maintenance manuals, and therefore insufficiently objective.

Mr Manoj Sam had commenced as Head of Quality and Safety on 5 November, the same day the report was sent. He reviewed it, conducted his own Just Culture assessment, and concluded the conduct amounted to a reckless violation.

He did not interview Mr Khan.

He told the Commission it was not important, in his view, to fairly consider an employee’s explanation before classifying conduct as reckless, despite not knowing what the employee’s intention had been. He said he had conducted substitution test interviews with other engineers, then conceded there was no record of them in his report, in his written evidence, or in the email he had pointed to. He explained that the conversations had happened by phone because of the sensitivity of the matter, and accepted he had no documentation of them at all. He agreed that the original investigator did not accept his conclusion.

Asked why he was entitled to revisit a completed report, his answer was that the aircraft are not the company’s, so a report is not final until the operator has scrutinised it and the Head of Quality and Safety has accepted it. He went further. Where matters relate to safety, he said, it is the company’s practice to change the findings of a report based on what the client proposes.

Mr Lockett, who had run that function for years, gave the contrary view. In his experience a customer airline cannot change the outcome of an internal investigation. It can make suggestions and recommendations, and the outcome remains the company’s. He said it would be unusual to change an outcome after a report had been completed, agreed, signed by the CEO and sent to the customer.

The finding that decided the case

Commissioner Simpson preferred the evidence of Ms Dickson and Mr Lockett to that of Mr Sam. He described Ms Dickson as a witness of credit with extensive experience in conducting investigations, and accepted her conclusion that Mr Khan did not engage in misconduct was, on balance, correct. The later characterisation as a reckless violation was inconsistent with her report and unsupported by the evidence.

The Commissioner declined to find that the dismissal was caused by pressure from the airline. But he recorded that the evidence was clear that the airline was displeased with the report, and that it was following the communication of that displeasure to the employer that Mr Sam’s review produced a different result, a result the hearing evidence did not support.

He also dealt with the employer’s attempt to lean on Mr Khan’s history. He held that the earlier incidents from 2023 and 2025 had already been dealt with, Mr Khan was never warned about any of them, and they could not be used after the fact to justify summary dismissal. He added that on the evidence, none of them would have supported a formal warning even in hindsight.

Where procedural fairness collapsed

Mr Khan was given no written allegations. He was given no show cause letter. He was not told that dismissal was being considered, and he was not told the meeting on 5 December 2025 was disciplinary, which meant he had no practical opportunity to decide whether he wanted a support person. His maintenance authorisation was withdrawn at 9:30 that morning. At 3:30 that afternoon he was handed a termination letter that had been prepared before the meeting began.

Ms Lynne Grant, the HR Business Partner who prepared and signed that letter, had never read the investigation report. She relied on what Mr Sam told her about it. She accepted she came to the meeting with the letter already written, and agreed that any comments Mr Khan made would most likely have made no difference.

He was also criticised in the termination letter for failing to attend a meeting at head office between 2 and 5 December. The Commissioner found that unfair. Mr Khan was on rostered days off, was working voluntary overtime night shifts to help the company on three of those days, told the employer so, and offered Friday 5 December, which the employer accepted by conduct. Characterising that as disregarding a direction did not survive contact with the text messages.

What HR Mangers should take from this

Decision makers must read the report. The person who signed the termination letter had never seen the investigation report and relied on a summary from the manager who had reversed it. A decision maker who has not read the primary document cannot weigh it, and cannot explain later why they departed from it.

Put the changed finding to the person. Where a reviewer reaches a different conclusion from the investigator, that conclusion is a new allegation. It has to be drafted, particularised and put, with a genuine opportunity to answer it before anything is decided.

The allegation stage is where this was lost

Every failure in this case runs back to the same point. Nothing was ever put to Mr Khan in writing.

Had the reclassified finding been drafted as an allegation and sent to him, three things would have had to happen. Someone would have had to state precisely what he was said to have done and why it was reckless. Someone would have had to identify the evidence supporting it, which in this case would have meant confronting the absence of any record of the substitution test interviews. And Mr Khan would have had to be given a real chance to answer it.

Any one of those steps would probably have stopped this dismissal. Writing the allegation is where an investigation discovers whether it actually has a case, which is exactly why weak cases skip it.

We run free training on writing allegations, covering structure, particularisation, and the drafting errors that hand respondents a procedural fairness argument. You can access it here: https://www.insightinvestigations.com.au/free-training-allegation-writing

Citation: Khan v Heston MRO Pty Ltd [2026] FWC 2008 (Commissioner Simpson, Brisbane, 31 July 2026)

Insight Investigations conducts independent workplace investigations across Australia. If you need an investigation report that will hold up, get in touch: https://www.insightinvestigations.com.au/contact