Quote:
Originally Posted by MandoMan
If you could call in sick for a year and get paid, could you in good conscience do it? I couldn’t. Plus, wouldn’t the employer check to see if the employer is really sick? Taking the days without being sick would be fraud, wouldn’t it? I was a professor at a state university for 34 years. I accumulated over 450 days of sick time. If I’d become seriously ill, that sick leave would have been a life saver. I thought I’d simply lose it all when I retired, which is what usually happened. Instead, the state universities, wanting to get rid of those of us who were old and in the way, offered to pay us for one fourth of our sick days in a lump sum if we would retire at the end of the school year. A lot of us took that offer. That’s the only way I could afford to move to The Villages. The rest of those sick days went unused.
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I never used most of my sick leave. But, many use all of it. A Federal employee does not need to be sick to use sick leave. They can use the leave to take care of someone else, and that person does not even need to be a family member. As a supervisor, it is almost impossible to deny sick leave, or to verify that the reason is valid. They can just say that they are leaving town to care for a sick friend or relative in another state. It is considered an earned benefit, and is almost never refused. Another problem is that some employees use all of their sick leave by just calling in sick whenever they have earned 8 hours. So, how can you deny someone who wants to use it all at once without discriminating?
There were some employees who actually delayed their retirement for more than a year, so that they could use their sick leave and get full pay and benefits for an extra year or so at the end of their career. Everyone knew that they were never coming back to work. This was sick leave abuse, but there was really nothing they could do to stop it.