Court Opinion

ID: 9585997
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:06:09.865251+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:24:18.414252
License: Public Domain

HUNTER, Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I concur with Section II of the majority opinion overruling the ESC’s cross-assignment of error. However, as I conclude the trial *429court correctly determined that the decision of the ESC is supported by competent evidence and proper findings of fact, which in turn support the conclusions of law, I respectfully dissent from the remainder of the opinion.
Petitioner was discharged from her employment for misconduct. Misconduct connected with the work is defined as
conduct evincing such willful or wanton disregard of an employer’s interest as is found in deliberate violations or disregard of standards of behavior which the employer has the right to expect of his employee, or in carelessness or negligence of such degree or recurrence as to manifest equal culpability, wrongful intent or evil design, or to show an intentional and substantial disregard of the employer’s interests or of the employee’s duties and obligations to his employer.
N.C. Gen. Stat. § 96-14(2) (2005) (emphasis added). The ESC found that petitioner “had removed the hard drive from the computer assigned to [petitioner] by the employer. The employer did not authorize [petitioner] to remove the hard drive.” The ESC concluded that petitioner’s “unauthorized removal of the hard drive of an employer computer[] showed a deliberate disregard of the standards of behavior that the employer had a right to expect of [petitioner].” The majority concludes there was insufficient evidence to support this conclusion. I disagree.
The majority asserts that “[t]here was no evidence that . . . the removal of the hard drive either inconvenienced or jeopardized Banner’s ability to operate.” This assertion is unsupported by the record. Petitioner’s superior, Thomas Maroney (“Maroney”) testified regarding the reaction of the company’s computer consultant when he learned of petitioner’s removal of the hard drive. He stated, “my God, if she drops it, if it falls, she’s in an accident, all the [company] records for the past seven years are gone.” According to Maroney, the hard drive contained “all the information about the Corporation — all of our customers are on there, our billing was on there, all of our customer lists were on there. Everything that we had gathered over all of the years was on the hard drive.” Maroney stated that, because of petitioner’s removal of the hard drive, “all the prior information that was on the computer” was gone and that “Banner Therapy, basically, was out of business as of that time, without the hard drive.” When the company discovered that the hard drive was missing, a computer consultant worked for ten to eleven hours, costing the *430company a “high price to get [the] system operating again so it could work on Monday morning.” Jeremy King, a computer technician employed by Banner, testified that the hard drive was “critical” to the company, and that its removal “caused us to waste a lot of time . . . trying to . . . get into our aecounts[.]” This evidence directly contradicts the majority’s assertion that “[t]here was no evidence that. . . the removal of the hard drive either inconvenienced or jeopardized Banner’s ability to operate.”
The majority concludes that “even if Binney was not expressly authorized to remove the hard drive from her work computer, there was no evidence that her conduct in doing so was unreasonable or was undertaken in bad faith.” Again, I must disagree. The evidence showed that removal of the hard drive was patently unreasonable. Respondent submitted uncontradicted evidence that petitioner physically removed the internal hard drive from her employer’s computer without authorization. King testified that such removal of the hard drive was not recommended, and that petitioner could have easily achieved the same result by either copying needed files onto computer discs or copying the hard drive. In addition to Maroney’s testimony. regarding the potentially disastrous consequences of petitioner’s actions in removing the hard drive and the hardship she caused to the company, Maroney testified that there “was never any authorization by anyone to take any computer hard drive . . . off the premises. It was never authorized, it was never discussed, and it would never have been permitted.” King testified that he would have never removed a hard drive from a company computer without authorization. This testimony underscores the obvious disregard by petitioner of well-established workplace behavioral norms regarding employer-owned computers and computer technology. In fact, the unauthorized removal of a hard drive from an employer’s computer is a criminal act under our General Statutes. See N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14466(a) (2005); State v. Johnston, 173 N.C. App. 334, 340-41, 618 S.E.2d 807, 811 (2005) (concluding that the trial court did not err in denying the defendant’s motion to dismiss the charge of violating N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-455 where the evidence showed she deliberately removed software from her employer’s computer without authorization, resulting in loss of data stored on the hard drive). As such, respondent submitted competent evidence that petitioner’s conduct in removing the hard drive without authorization was unreasonable and supports the ESC’s determination that petitioner exhibited a “deliberate disregard of the standards of behavior that the employer had a right to expect of [her].” See Lynch v. PPG Industries, 105 N.C. *431App. 223, 225, 412 S.E.2d 163, 165 (1992). By disregarding the competent evidence in support of the ESC’s decision, the majority violates our well-established standard of review and places itself in the role of fact-finder. In re Graves v. Culp, Inc., 166 N.C. App. 748, 750, 603 S.E.2d 829, 830 (2004) (“[t]he [ESC] will be upheld if there is any competent evidence to support its findings”).
The majority concludes that because petitioner had the authority to maintain the company computers, she had the apparent authority to remove the hard drive. This conclusion disregards this Court’s limited role on appeal. First, the ESC expressly found that petitioner was not authorized to remove the hard drive. There was substantial evidence to support this finding. We are therefore bound by such a finding. See id. (stating that, in the absence of fraud, the ESC’s findings are conclusive where there is any competent evidence to support them, and the jurisdiction of the court is confined to questions of law). The majority, however, ignores our standard of review and finds its own facts to support its conclusion that petitioner was authorized to remove the hard drive. Second, there is a vast degree of difference between having authorization to maintain a computer and having authorization to physically remove the internal hard drive of a computer containing a company’s entire database and take it off-site. The ESC found and concluded that this action, which arguably violated N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-455(a), demonstrated a deliberate disregard of the standards of behavior that petitioner’s employer had a right to expect of her. The majority’s conclusion to the contrary improperly attempts to substitute its own view for that of the ESC.
I conclude that the ESC’s determination regarding petitioner's misconduct arising from her unauthorized removal of her employer’s hard drive is supported by the evidence and the findings of fact and sustains its decision to deny her unemployment benefits. As such, I need not address the ESC’s second ground for misconduct, that of petitioner’s unauthorized assertion of a personal copyright interest in the company catalog. Thus, the trial court properly affirmed the decision of the ESC, and I would uphold the trial court.