Mrs S Hasler v And Mr Jim Maag c/o Curvin Transport Services — 2021

Mrs S Hasler applied for reconsideration of the tribunal’s earlier refusal to accept her claim form dated 4 December 2020. The original rejection had been made because the respondent named on the form, “Mr Jim Maag c/o Curvin Transport Services”, did not match the early conciliation certificate found by the ACAS search using the certificate number entered on the form, which matched “AET Transport Services”.

In her reconsideration application dated 29 October 2021, the claimant said she had entered the AET certificate number on the form by mistake and should have used the Curvin certificate number, which she gave as R214376/20/40. The tribunal held that the original rejection under rule 12(1)(f) was correct because there was a significant mismatch between the respondent named on the form and the certificate matched to the number entered, and there was no basis at that stage to treat the error as a minor one under rule 12(1)(da).

The tribunal also held that the defect had not been rectified. An ACAS database search produced no match for certificate number R214376/20/40. It said that even if that number were a valid ECC for Curvin Transport (Poole) Ltd, the original rejection was not wrong and the date of acceptance would not be backdated, so the claim would still be substantially out of time. The application also gave no adequate explanation for the delay in seeking reconsideration, so there was no basis to extend time under rule 5. The reconsideration application was therefore refused because there was no reasonable prospect of the original judgment being varied or revoked.