Summary: It was argued by Mashhoon that a spin-rotation coupling term should add to the Hamiltonian operator in a rotating frame, as compared with the one in an inertial frame. For a Dirac particle, the Hamiltonian and energy operators H and E in a given reference frame were recently proved to depend on the tetrad field. We argue that this non-uniqueness of H and E really is a physical problem. We show that a tetrad field contains two informations about local rotation, which usually do not coincide. We compute the energy operator in the inertial and the rotating frame, using three different tetrad fields. We find that Mashhoon’s term is there if the spatial triad rotates as does the reference frame – but then it is also there in the energy operator for the inertial frame. In fact, if one uses the same given tetrad field, the Dirac Hamiltonian operators in two reference frames in relative rotation differ only by the angular momentum term. If the Mashhoon effect is to exist for a Dirac particle, the tetrad field must be selected in a specific way for each reference frame.