Overly specific discipline policy can spark liability

Q. I'm the HR director, and our discipline policy is very complicated and has several different categories of offenses. It says that if employees commit offenses that may result in suspensions of more than three days, employees are allowed a pre-disciplinary counseling conference. Now, my manager thinks that conference should be skipped if the employee has already been counseled for a prior offense in the past 12 months. I'm concerned that this deviates from our policy. Can we do this? —S.D., Illinois