Query re fraud and sick pay

[Pammela2]

Can a person continue to claim sick pay from their work place if they have moved 3 hours away from their place of work, sold their house and have no intention of returning?

They are still getting their sick line from their old gp and have not told their employer of this change, or their GP by the sounds of things.

If you are their line manager or you work in HR, how do you know that this employee has no intention of returning to work?

What are your sick pay rules? Where I used to work, it was six months on full pay and six months on half pay. If they were not ready to return at that point, HR and Occupational Health would look at retirement on health grounds.

If they have received over £150K over the years, this would imply that they are relatively senior in the organisation. If that is the case, has this made it more difficult to deal with?

@Pammela2 has their been a referral to OH?

I would be looking very carefully at all the policies setting out entitlements, what they have actually taken in leave/sick pay. Plus making sure the managing attendance policy has been followed to the letter.

HR here. If you know this, and are the person’s manager, why the fuck aren’t you MANAGING THEM?

There’s a few people involved with different managers and then people from the council and union involvement. The council have probably messed up somewhere and are now allowing it to drag. The non sickness policy for covid took up half this time, then immediate may leave, then argued for a lot of holiday days and now the sick pay..
But I think it’s just going to have to run its course as per the council instructions.

Sometimes, people just know how to play the bloody system. It's infuriating and shit but it is what it is. Just grit your teeth and if you have any strong proof of the fraud, pass it along to those dealing with the case. I've dealt with an insane amount of these over the years working in HR, but legally the whole thing can blow up if every word you utter isn't airtight.

This

It’s not so hard. Just need not to let it drift. Why should the public foot the bill for such blatant piss taking?

Is she not being invited to regular sickness meetings?

Why is it any of your business?

When I started a job over 10 years ago, my predecessor had left due to long term ill health. He is still on the payroll now. After a certain period of time, the company's insurers take over making the payments. The insurer has certain requirements re whether the person is fit to return to work, either to the former role or a different role, and the person has to submit to the necessary assessments if they want to continue to receive the pay.

But it's none of your business unless you own the company and are responsible for making the payments.

It’s local authority. The public pay.

@ItTook9Years I do a lot of work for public sector clients. The scale of incompetence and mismanagement of budgets is so enormous that this sort of thing is pretty low down the list of things to get excited about.

i’m ex-finance. It’s criminal how much gets paid wasted.

It is. I'm a lawyer and regularly deal with cases along the lines of "we've paid out £5m under this contract over the past 5 years and have just realised that £600 of that was over-charged, can we claim it back?" Yes you can claim it back, but you'll spend another £300-400k doing so and even if you win, you'll only get about 70% of your costs back.

Sorry should have said £609k

It can't have been going on for years. Sick pay doesn't last for years. Even ssp is only 26 weeks

Isn’t there a staff policy about keeping records up to date?

I think people are confused. Our council had a policy that being off with covid/long covid wasn’t counted as sick leave. They were off on full pay but not in work. This only changed about a year ago. That is how this situation has been able to be ongoing for so long.

Should say it only changed for those already off, not new cases

A gp can de-register you from their books after three months.

Surely the workplace would have investigated the long term sick? Surely someone in the business would have heard on the grapevine that Barry from accounts had moved house etc.

I’m struggling to get my head round this.
No other business could afford this policy. Yet it’s for the public purse to keep paying out?

If nobody is holding meetings with an employee that has been absent for years to establish their plans for returning, or dismissing if they won’t be, they should give back the portion if their salary which reflects their management responsibility. It’s ridiculous and there is zero legal reason to allow this to happen.

You say 'even' SSP but that's the statutory minimum. Plenty of employers have schemes that pay more; it's called contractual sick pay. As PP says in some cases it's taken over by insurers.

This case is in a Local Authority and, on OP's account, sounds like industrial scale piss taking. Such things used to be possible in the Civil Service. It was known as working your ticket and you ended up on a damn good pension while still in early middle age. It largely stopped when the cost was transferred from a central pot to individual departments.

Piss takers who knew the rules and had support of union reps got away with murder.

Quite. It’s an absolute joke and galling for everyone who has been picking up the slack. An embarrassment.

What are you doing about it?

Surely some responsibility lies with the GP who keeps signing them off?

I don’t believe for a minute that even if this Covid/long Covid policy exists that someone could be off with it for years without a sick note. Otherwise they’d have hardly had anyone in especially during school holidays.

This sounds like the local government equivalent to the threads people start about their friends who supposedly claim £10,000 in benefits fraudulently.