Transferring Vacation Time

josei23

We are a non profit health care organization in Maine and we have 5 facilities in the state. Our personnel policies state that if an employee transfers to another location, the earned benefit time (a pool of sick/vacation/holiday time) will be transferred to him/her to the new facility. The liability however, will be maintained and charged to the facilty in which the time was earned.

We are in the process of updating our personnel policies and wondered if this was something that could be changed - is there a reason why the liability wouldn't go to the facility that the employee was transferring to???

Thanks for your help!!

Don Avery

Assuming that each facility has a separate budget for which it is accountable, you may find that facilities will be reluctant to receive an employee in a transfer who has a significant PTO balance because it would have a negative impact on their budget. If that were to be the case, internal employees would be at a disadvantage to outside candidates for open positions. One possible answer would be for the current facility to transfer funds to the receiving facility equal to the value of the PTO. Accumulated sick days might be excluded from the dollar transfer in that they are a contingent liability that might never be utilized.

Down_the_Middle

I used to do this alot in a former life. We started out by saying that the cost of the accrued vacation remained at the employer where it was earned. We soon found that this was a problem for the former employer (who incurred the cost plus the accrual for the replacement employee). This was resolved to everyone's satisfaction by transferring the vacation cost to the new employer with the transferee. It was a cost of internal transfers and more properly belonged with the new employer, just as would be the case of a transfer within the same employer.