Employee Concerns: A Case Study
We met our Newcastle-based client as part of the free consultation service we offer to everyone. They explained that they felt they were being defrauded by one of their staff who had been off for 5 months with an injury they’d claimed they sustained at work.
The staff member (let’s call him ‘Keith’) was in the process of taking legal action against their employer and claimed that they could no longer walk around without sticks for support.
‘Keith’ was receiving full sick pay from our client who were in turn being fully cooperative with all litigation they were having levied against them – but rumours had started to circulate that there was nothing wrong with ‘Keith’ and he was actually working in another job, “cash in hand” in Gateshead. Read more about Employee Concerns: A Case Study …

It is important for us within our line of work – when investigating issues surrounding employee absence and staff sickness around Newcastle and the whole of the North East – to be very clear about where we stand as a company
In our field of work we take formal victim and witness statements to a high evidential standard for a wealth of different reasons – sometimes they relate to internal employee investigations, sometimes they are to do with road traffic collisions to name but two.
A lot of companies in our field – heck, a lot of companies full stop – use the ‘case studies’ space on their professional blog to tell big, detailed stories about how they achieved a fantastic result for their client, confirmed all their worst suspicions and caught the ‘bad buy’ or whatever. God knows, there’s a fair enough amount of those very types of case studies in our own archives. Scroll through and take a look.
We are asked frequently – especially within the realms of the commercial investigations we complete against rogue employees – about recording people covertly. We are always keen to encourage employers and employees alike to err on the side of extreme caution around this.
Our Newcastle city centre based client got in touch with us after having Surmount recommended to them by a previous organisation we’d worked with, checking us out online and liking what they saw. They brought us in to consult with regards to concerns they had regarding one of their staff.
We met our Newcastle-based client as part of the free consultation service we offer to everyone. They explained that they felt they were being defrauded by one of their staff who had been off for 5 months with an injury they’d claimed they sustained at work.
A client contacted us after seeing one of our Facebook posts. She had started up her own fitness studio in Newcastle and offered bespoke exercise classes, nutrition plans and physiotherapy support to her clients.
As a result of a lot of negative feedback online to a rather disreputable ‘investigation consultancy’ company and comments / posts that they made on the topic of investigating “long term sickness”, Surmount stepped into the ring, so to speak, on what proved to be a particularly contentious topic and show you where we stand and why we think it’s important others come to share the same stance.
It’s all too often down-played by employees around the world when entering into a ‘them versus us’ type battle but it’s extremely important to remember that ‘time theft’ by an employee is all too real.