Unused Vacation and Sick Leave Donation

Buster and Sister · March 2004

Do you allow your employees to voluntarily transfer/donate unused vacation and sick leave to other employees? (i.e. employee has exhausted all earned leave and will go w/o pay).

Our policy states vacation and sick leave does not carry over each year. Employees cannot sell unused leave.

I'm aware that the federal government established a Voluntary Leave Transfer Program to allow their employees to transer unused leave to other employees whose family, or family members, were suffering from a personal emergency.

deniseE · March 2004

we are working on a Sick Leave Bank Policy..that would perform this function. Administratively, I can see it being a bear to manage. We've provided differnt "donation" levels, so that we don't have a Customer Service Rep out on the "salary" of an EVP. Our sick leave is part of our pay scale...so we have to balance the cost on the books.

Does any one have one in progress now?

Beave · March 2004

I did a post about this same issue back in October 2003 I believe . I did a lot of research and came up with an entensive policy complete with various forms. Our county commissioners ultimately decided not to adopt this policy and agreed to handle each situation as they arise. It can be an administrative nightmare if not implimented correctly. If you'd like a copy of what I finalized, I could forward it to you. Good luck.

Caroliso · March 2004

Beave, could you forward me a copy of your policy at [email]Caroliso@aol.com[/email]? Thanks

bakerdmw · March 2004

Beave,

Can you forward a copy of your info to [email]dbaker@detroit.lib.mi.us[/email]

Thanks, Dottie

hrbanker · March 2004

I looked into this briefly last year. As I recall you cannot attach a 'value' to the days donated or it messes up the taxation. A day is a day, whether the person donating it was making
$10/hour or $50/hour.

I decided to not go forward with the plan. We have Paid Time Off sufficient to cover vacation, sick and personal time each year. Most employees try to save a few days each year for illness or emergency situations. It's the ones who use all of their PTO days for vacation each year who don't have any available in an emergency.

HRQ · March 2004

hrbanker, that's interesting. I'm not sure I follow though. The way we process the donation, the earnings are taxed at the recipient's rate.

Can you explain further or tell me where you researched the issue? I am NO expert on taxes. The way we did it balanced on our books and made sense to me.

Thanks!

HRQ · March 2004

We do allow employees to donate - don't have a written policy at this time.

To process the donation, we did the following;
Figure $ value of donor's PTO: 3 hrs X 5.15 (hrly wage) = $15.45
Reduce donor's vacation bank by 3 hours
Recipient is paid $15.45 in vacation pay (not paid hourly vacation, because that would put her bank in the negative)

Hope that made sense...

Also try a search using the words "vacation donation". There are several discussions over the past year. Good luck! x:)

Beave · March 2004

Lori, I forwarded on what I ended up with. I proposed doing a simple day for day transaction irregardless of hourly pay rates. Hope it helps. Good luck.

HRQ · March 2004

Thanks! I'm sure it will help. We've been winging it, which is not a good thing I suppose. x;-)

crawfod · March 2004

While our City government does not allow vacation leave to be transferred, we do have what we call a "Sick Leave Pool" program that works very well and allows employees to receive income, once they exhaust their current accrued personal Sick Leave and Vacation Leave. This policy is detailed and several pages long, but if anyone is interested and can accept a Word document email attachment, contact me at [email]crawfod@bellsouth.net[/email] and I can send it to you. No faxes, please, and I don't check the forum as much as I would like, so emailing me would be best.

Dutch2 · March 2004

We have approx. 125 ee's and we too looked into doing this a year or so back. Based on the potential additional cost to our company we decided to pass it by, at least at this time. I have been challenged to find ways to reduce our overall benefit cost this year.
Good luck to you,
Dutch2

Unused Vacation and Sick Leave Donation

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