Boss okayed pay rise after leaving

A jury must decide whether a senior manager in the education sector who allegedly approved an $11,000 pay rise for a then-former colleague was breaking the law when he did so.

The man and the female colleague are standing trial in the Hamilton District Court, where each are facing charges of using a document with intent to obtain a pecuniary advantage on or before September 7,

2016, at a location in the Waikato. The precise location and the type of document the man, who is aged in his 40s, and the woman, who is aged in her 50s, allegedly made use of cannot be reported because their identities and occupations have been suppressed.

The defendants are alleged to have submitted a document to the Ministry of Education that effectively gave the manager’s co-defendant a pay rise backdated to June 2015.

The manager was allegedly not authorised to do so at that time, because he had moved on to another position.

On the second day of the trial yesterday the court heard evidence from the manager’s replacement, and the chairwoman of a board charged with the responsibility of overseeing the organisation.

It was the new manager who discovered evidence of the alleged offending when, in February 2017, he found email exchanges made in August and September 2016 between the two defendants – who by that time had both left the organisation – that referred to the transactions.

He had earlier noticed an increase in the co-defendant’s salary, including the back-payment, which took effect in October 2016.

‘‘I had not authorised it and I asked [the co-defendant] why she was getting a big pay rise.’’

The increase totalled $11,445 and took the co-defendant’s salary from

$68,000 per annum to about $75,000. The co-defendant had told the new manager that his predecessor had authorised the increase in the preceding July, and issues with the payroll firm had delayed it taking effect until October.

The trial, before Judge Glen Marshall, will continue today with the opening of the defence.