A Victorian insurance brokerage has successfully defended an unfair dismissal claim after the Fair Work Commission found one of its former account managers altered a years-old letter and then relied on the edited version in a separate legal claim against her employer.
The Commission's Deputy President Millhouse ruled on 4 September 2026 that Ringwood-based brokerage CCIB Services Pty Ltd did not unfairly dismiss Foula Dendroulakis, who had worked for the business since February 2021, after concluding the company held a genuine and reasonable belief that she had engaged in serious misconduct.
Underneath the misconduct finding sat a much more ordinary problem: a mismatch between what an employment contract says and what a business actually does day to day.
Dendroulakis's contract described her as an "Account Manager." But her business cards, email signature, LinkedIn profile and the company's own client correspondence all referred to her as a "Senior Account Manager" or "Senior Account Executive," titles co-directors Ryan Fisher and Kurt Alder both told the Commission had applied to her role from the outset, in recognition of her experience and client portfolio.
The discrepancy surfaced repeatedly over the years. In 2022, Dendroulakis wrote to the company's then director asking for a pay rise, opening the letter by thanking the company for the opportunities it had given her "in my role as Senior Account Manager." The specific rise she asked for wasn't granted, but the company gave her a different pay increase weeks later, along with a position description for a "Senior Account Executive" role.
The title issue resurfaced in late 2025 during an unrelated dispute over office seating, when Dendroulakis pushed back on a reshuffle that left her unhappy with the temperature of her allocated desk. She asked for a private office or two work-from-home days a week; the directors said no, citing productivity data that didn't support extra remote work. In the same exchange, she raised the fact her contract still said "Account Manager" rather than "Senior Account Manager," despite five years of performing duties she said matched the senior title.
CCIB's response, in a letter dated 24 November 2025, acknowledged the word "Senior" had been left off her contract "in error" and offered to formally correct it.
By then, the relationship had already soured on another front. In August 2025, Alder had raised concerns that Dendroulakis wasn't being productive while working from home and was spending time on personal calls during work hours. One incident stood out: she left the office early ahead of a client meeting, then gave what Fisher described as shifting explanations for the early departure, which triggered a written exchange between the pair that August.
Two months later, a further meeting about Dendroulakis's working-from-home output, measured against the company's internal filing system, led to a first and final warning on 27 November 2025 covering both productivity and dishonesty concerns.
Four days later, on 1 December 2025, Dendroulakis filed a separate general protections application with the Commission, alleging she'd been underpaid and that her contract had been unilaterally varied because she was doing a senior role on a junior title. Attached to that application was a copy of her 2022 pay-rise letter - but with one word missing. Where the original read "my role as Senior Account Manager," the version filed with the Commission read simply "my role as Account Manager."
Alder said the discrepancy struck him as "odd" when he read the application, and once he compared the two versions, "alarm bells went off." The company issued a show-cause letter and stood Dendroulakis down on full pay while it investigated.
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Through her solicitors, Dendroulakis said the change was inadvertent — a "reflexive correction" she'd made to a locally saved Word copy of the letter after realising her actual contract said "Account Manager," and had simply forgotten about by the time she filed her application. She said the stress of the dispute had affected her attention to detail and was "sincerely remorseful."
CCIB didn't buy it. Alder told the Commission her explanation "lacked all credibility" and that he no longer trusted her "to tell the truth or perform her duties as required." He said this mattered because the business handles sensitive client and financial information and regularly reminds its own clients of their duty of disclosure. Fisher gave similar evidence, saying Dendroulakis had "become a liability to the business" and that the necessary relationship of trust and confidence had been "completely eroded, beyond the point of recovery." She was dismissed with immediate effect on 15 December 2025.
Dendroulakis argued CCIB shouldn't get the benefit of the Small Business Fair Dismissal Code -which applies to employers with fewer than 15 staff - because it operates under a joint venture arrangement with Coverforce Partners and should have Coverforce's broader headcount attributed to it. At one point during the hearing she also appeared to argue she'd actually been employed by a Coverforce entity rather than CCIB.
Millhouse rejected both arguments, finding CCIB was named on Dendroulakis's payslips and employment contract, that ownership sat solely with Fisher and Alder, and that while Coverforce Partners provides guidance on growth and marketing, it has no control over CCIB's day-to-day operations or financial and workplace decisions. With 14 employees at the relevant time, CCIB qualified as a small business employer.
That finding mattered because it meant the Commission only had to assess whether CCIB's dismissal process met the Code's "summary dismissal" test, not the more detailed procedural checklist that applies to larger employers. Under the Code, a small business can dismiss an employee without notice if it genuinely and reasonably believes the conduct is serious enough to justify it. The Commission found CCIB's directors met that bar: they'd given Dendroulakis a show-cause letter, considered her response, and formed a view that was objectively reasonable given the material before them.
For principals and directors of insurance broking businesses — many of which sit comfortably under the 15-employee small business threshold — the decision is a reminder that the Small Business Fair Dismissal Code gives real protection, but only where an employer can show it genuinely investigated a concern and gave the employee a fair chance to respond before acting. A show-cause letter and a documented response process did the job here.
The case also underlines why job title housekeeping matters more than it might seem. A gap between a contract's stated title and the title a business actually uses on cards, email signatures and client correspondence created friction that ran through a 2022 pay negotiation, a 2025 seating dispute and, ultimately, the events that led to a dismissal.
Whether Dendroulakis's underlying general protections and underpayment claims have any merit wasn't decided in this ruling. The Commission didn't need to reach them once it found the dismissal was consistent with the Code, so that dispute remains open.
