“Dziennik Łódzki” describes the case a woman who signed a four-month employment contract with a one-person renovation company. In the second month work went on sick leave. However, the court ruled that this was a benefit fraud, because the employment was fictitious. During the trial, the explanation that the employer had hired the woman to help with issuing invoices was not accepted. During the period in question, the company did not issue any invoices.
It's not worth cheating on sick leave. ZUS has tools to catch cheaters
– Social Insurance Institution has many tools today to verify actual employment. What is important, we can be employed full-time and run a business or have an additional contract of mandate. Please note that if we receive a letter of dismissal, we cannot perform any work – says money.pl Piotr Juszczyk, Chief Tax Advisor at inFakt.
ZUS may send an inspector to check whether we are at the address given in the sick leave. If we are not there, ZUS may consider that the sick leave rules have been violated. However, it also depends on what doctor will write on the sick leave. If we are advised to lie down, the patient should not move without a good reason. However, if there are no such recommendations, moderate activity, such as walking, is not prohibited. But you cannot perform any activities that may impede recovery.
This means that going on holiday while on sick leave is not permitted, which was confirmed by the ZUS spokesman in the past. Piotr Juszczyk, however, points out that a trip could be justified in some cases, e.g. when moving to the seaside from a place where the air is polluted, which will speed up convalescence.
Sick Leave Manager. Does Poland have a problem with the number of sick leave days?
In addition to ZUS inspections, it is increasingly common that companies are checking their own employees and even introducing sick leave managers, as we wrote about in November last year. The media have been writing for years about the “plague of sick leave” in Polish companies. According to ZUS data, 27 million medical certificates of temporary incapacity for work were registered in Poland in 2022, for a total of 288.8 million days. This is almost a third more than the previous year (20.5 million).
On the other hand, as many as 40% of Poles did not take any sick leave in 2022, which may be due to, among other things, the communalization of the labor market. In Europe, the most common people taking sick leave include the Spanish (39% never took it), the French (34%), the British (27%) and the Germans (20%). Even among Americans, only 23% of employees did not take sick leave between July 2022 and July 2023, despite the lack of federal regulations that would give every employee the right to paid sick leave.
– I have my doubts about the idea of appointing a manager for sick leave management. It seems that such a manager would primarily have the function of disciplining employees – commented Piotr Szumlewicz, head of the Union Alternative, for Next.Gazeta.pl.