Employers shouldn’t take an employee’s word for it that he or she needs FMLA leave. Make the employee go through the paces, as the FMLA rules allow. And don’t feel bound by the law’s 5-day requirement for asking for proof of the need for leave if you suspect that the leave or its duration may not be appropriate.
Those are the lessons from this week’s ruling by the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in a case brought against Ohio Bell Telephone Company by an employee who sought FMLA leave at the same time she was pursuing disability benefits.
The case involves a particular FMLA regulation that gives an employer 5 days to request certification of leave following a leave request, but that also allows delaying that request “if the employer has reason to question the appropriateness of the leave or its duration.”
In this case, the employee had also applied for disability benefits; the company’s benefits administrator chopped three weeks of her question.
That got the company thinking that maybe she wasn’t entitled to FMLA leave either, since the policy’s standard for an employee’s disability status was “similar enough” to the FMLA’s “serious health” standard for employee eligibility.
The company waited a while to request the certification, which the plaintiff never provided. So the two got tangled up in court, with the plaintiff charging that the delay had “interefered” with her FMLA rights.
The appeals court ruled against her. There was no interference, it said, only a reasonable question as to whether FMLA leave was appropriate.
Here’s the ruling in Kinds v. Ohio Bell Tel. Co.