Donating Sick Days
Ed C
27 Posts
Our company is facing its first situtation where an employee is facing a very serious medical situation. Our LTD kicks in at 90 days. The employee does not have enough sick time to fully cover the 90 days so co-workers want to "donate" their sick days to this employee. Also, the employee may want to try and "work when I feel able" which would not allow our LTD to start.
Legal issues re: the dontation of days? Any feedback in general is appreciated.
Legal issues re: the dontation of days? Any feedback in general is appreciated.
Comments
We value the donated annual leave at the donors rate and convert it to the donees rate. We require our Exec Dir to approve a catastrophic leave request from the EE needing the leave - we do not allow the EE to directly solicit donations from other EEs.
An E-mail goes out from HR saying Catastrophic leave has been approved, anyone interested in donating time should contact HR.
We do not mention the EEs name or the nature of the catastrophe.
Marc, why is it necessary to do this valuation/conversion? Is there some sort of tax compensation issue involved?
We are facing a catastrophic leave request too, and what you have raised was not taken into consideration.
Please elaborate.
We accrue earned by unused vacation on the books - it is valued at the pay rate of the person that used it.
We simply decided a fair valuation was to convert the donated hours into dollars - so if the donor was giving up 8 hours earned at $20 per hour, $160 was being donated. If the donees hourly rate is $10 - then they will receive 16 hours of time. If the donees hourly rate is $30, they will receive 5.34 hours of time.
Make sense?
We have been caught in the past with employees who try to work when they feel able and then goof up the eligibility counts for LTD, but as long as we can't prove manipulation, we're kind of stuck there. In practice it doesn't happen very often and for every attempt at manipulation, we have others who sincerely want to be at work (and being at work in such situations has been linked to faster healing).
We've taken up monetary collections...and this helps ease the burden a bit.
If you know the ee will be off for more than 90 days, it may be in his best interest to not work and let the LTD kick in as soon as possible.
any chance he can dip into a retirement account?
*edit*...we also have an "anticipated" leave policy that allows ee's to use future leave time for current things....like this....they have to have been with us for at least one full year...and have 1/2 of the leave needed on the books.
Is this a standing pool of time/dollars or solicited only when there is a need?
Calculated in terms of hours or dollars?
Are donations accepted at any time or just when solicited?
What kinds of illnesses/injuries qualify?
Who decides what is qualifying and what is not - HR or a committee?
Are those who donate required to keep a minimum balance in their account or can they donate the whole thing?
Will there be a requirement for the recipient to reimburse the pool in some way?
Can those who donate, donate vacation as well?
Is there some sort of length of service requirement before an employee can receive donations?
How often can they receive donations?
An employee can transfer no more than 1/2 their leave. The employee to whom leave is being transfered can't receive more than 20 days total per occurence. They can't transfer it back unless it's unused.
The only issue I've run into with this is that it makes people want to talk about the details of employee medical conditions, which we discourage.
Half HR