A company which unfairly made a worker redundant, then cost her another job by refusing, without explanation, to fill out a reference questionnaire in time, must now pay €40,000 towards her extended losses.The worker, Shulammite Awotundun, spent 14 months out of work after being let go from her job as a travel consultant at Brendan Vacations Ireland Ltd on Christmas Eve 2024, despite getting a job offer before the end of February 2025.Brendan Vacations had told the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) Awotundun’s redundancy had nothing to do with “any personal characteristic, conduct, or performance”.The firm cited a drop-off in online booking inquiries when figures from March 2023 were compared to August 2024 – an approach described by a WRC adjudicator as “bizarre”, in view of the seasonal nature of the industry.Adjudication officer Breiffni O’Neill ruled in the company failed to show a “genuine” case for redundancy and declared the dismissal unfair on both substantive and procedural grounds. Awotundun’s losses would have been limited to just three-and-a-half months’ pay if not for her old employer’s “silence and lack of engagement” about why it was refusing to complete the reference questionnaire asked for by her new company, O’Neill found.The company had informed the WRC its policy on references was to issue only a statement of service and state the reason for the worker’s employment coming to an end. O’Neill stressed in his decision that this was an “entirely legitimate” policy adopted by many employers.But because of the firm’s “failure to communicate that position clearly and in a timely manner”, the new company was “reasonably entitled to draw adverse inferences”, he wrote. The WRC heard Awotundun’s new company wrote to her two nominated referees at Brendan Vacations on Tuesday 24 March 2025 and asked them to fill out what the WRC noted to be “a brief questionnaire” – but neither replied.Instead, the company’s operations director emailed back at the end of the week with a response “confined to issuing a statement of service” and the reason for her departure, the adjudicator, Breiffni O’Neill, recorded.The new employer again asked that the questionnaire be filled out on Thursday 3 April 2025, but let Awotundun start work the following Monday anyway, O’Neill noted.His view was that she had done so believing “entirely reasonably” that all the pre-employment checks were finished.“The requested questionnaire was not completed, nor was any explanation provided for its non-completion,” O’Neill added.She learned this on 28 April, the last Monday of the month, and wrote to the director of operations at Brendan Vacations asking for the reference to be finalised, the adjudicator noted further.O’Neill wrote that while Awotundun did not “explicitly spell out the urgency” of the situation, the “foreseeable consequences of continued silence should have been obvious”.Three days later, she was left jobless for the second time due to “unsatisfactory” reference checks, the tribunal heard.Awotundun wrote again to the former operations director at Brendan Vacations the following week asking for an explanation, and asking specifically whether there was “any issue” about her conduct or performance, the tribunal heard.She was by then “very concerned” about her old employer’s view of her, the tribunal noted.Brendan Vacations finally sent the completed questionnaire six weeks after it was asked for – but by then, the new job was gone, O’Neill noted further.When Awotundun told the operations director what happened, the senior manager wrote back: “It’s disappointing to hear that. I really wish they had followed up with me again.”The adjudicator wrote: “That response demonstrates an incredible lack of insight into the respondent’s own role in the sequence of events.”O’Neill found that the acts and omissions of Brendan Vacations in relation to the reference process were a causative factor in Ms Awotundun’s ongoing financial losses from the unfair dismissal.He held Brendan Vacations liable for all of Awotundun’s losses from December 2024 to April 2025, and 75 per cent of her losses for the period of 10-and-a-half months she found herself out of work again after May 2025.In all, the travel agency was ordered to pay its former employee €40,789 for unfair dismissal.