Care worker forged his boss's signature on a £9,000 pay deal...but misspelt her name

Published 30 October 2026, 16:39

• An employment tribunal threw out Franklin Addo's wage claim against home care firm Jocelyn Cares, ruling he 'behaved dishonestly'.
• Under cross-examination, Addo admitted the signature on the deal and his boss's passport signature were 'totally different'.
• Company director Jocelyn Owusu-Asabere said she only ever signed a promise to seek a settlement, not to pay up.

A care worker lost his entire pay claim after an employment tribunal found he had forged his employer's signature on a document purporting to show she had agreed to pay him £9,176.36 in outstanding wages — and had misspelled her name directly above the fake signature.

Franklin Addo had filed his claim in August 2025 against Jocelyn Cares Domiciliary Limited, a home care firm, seeking arrears of pay for April, May, June and July 2025.

During the proceedings, he produced a document headed "REDRAWAL OF CASE" and dated 5 September 2025, which purported to show that company director Jocelyn Owusu-Asabere had agreed at a meeting on 28 August 2025 to pay him the outstanding wages plus travel time payments.

Owusu-Asabere told the tribunal under oath that she had attended the meeting and signed a document, but that it was not the one Addo produced.

She said she had signed only a general commitment to seek a settlement, not a binding agreement to pay, and that she had never seen the document before Addo submitted it in the litigation.

The tribunal identified several signs of forgery.

The company's name was misspelled as "Dormiciliary" rather than "Domiciliary."

Owusu-Asabere's surname was spelled "Asabre" rather than "Asabere" — directly above the signature attributed to her.

And the signature on the document bore no resemblance to her signature on her passport, which was placed before the tribunal as evidence, according to the ruling published on the Employment Tribunal decisions register.

Under cross-examination, Addo himself admitted the two signatures were "totally different."

He suggested Owusu-Asabere may have deliberately signed differently from the outset to give herself grounds to deny the agreement later — a theory the tribunal rejected, noting both parties appeared to have wanted to settle at the time.

The tribunal also noted the document was unusually sparse for one committing a party to pay more than £9,000, referenced travel time payments not in Addo's original claim but gave no figure for them, and bore a date of 5 September 2025 — more than a week after the meeting — appearing only beside Addo's own signature.

Addo explained that he had backdated his signature in order to give the company confidence that he planned to drop his claim ahead of the cutoff for the firm to file its response.

The tribunal acknowledged factors in Addo's favour: Owusu-Asabere did meet him and sign something; a transcript of the 28 August meeting showed her referring to paying money and signing a document with sections for both parties; the company produced no copy of what it claimed was the true document; and Addo's schedule of loss had grown to over £27,000, meaning a fraudster might have fabricated a larger sum.

The tribunal found on the balance of probabilities that Addo had created the document himself.

It ruled it was "inherently unlikely" that Owusu-Asabere would not have noticed her own name was misspelled on a document she was signing, and "much more likely that the Claimant spelled her name wrong and then filled in the signature himself."

The tribunal found Addo had "behaved dishonestly" and that his conduct was "scandalous, vexatious and/or unreasonable," ruling it was "difficult to think of a more obvious example" of prohibited conduct.

His dishonesty had "fatally undermined the Tribunal's faith in his evidence," making a fair trial impossible.

Strike-out was described as "draconian" but the tribunal concluded there was "no alternative sanction which would enable this matter to proceed fairly," and dismissed the claim entirely.