The absence of a diagnosis on a sick leave certificate is not grounds for refusal to pay benefits.

Errors on sick leave: acceptable or not?

Paper will endure anything - this is not about drawing up official documents. Any reporting document requires strictly defined completion. The same applies to a certificate of temporary incapacity for work, or, more simply put, sick leave. Any corrections or blots may make it invalid, as a result of which FSS employees will refuse to pay the corresponding benefit.

Important! If the temporary disability certificate is filled out incorrectly, not only the employee, but also the employer may suffer: the law provides for administrative liability for him.

It should be remembered that in the registration of sick leave there are errors that are considered minor and, on the contrary, those that are serious violations.

Recalculation procedure

If circumstances arise that have already been described above, the employer can independently change the calculations for previous years.

This is important to know: How to correctly fill out a sick leave certificate: an example of filling out 2021

The employee has the right to submit an application for adjustment of the deduction amount. The application is written to the director of the enterprise or the head of a structural unit. It is compiled in free form.

There is no single template for writing a paper in the legislative norms, but an employee can ask the HR or accounting department about the availability of a template.

In order for the requirements to be satisfied, the applicant must attach the following documents to the application:

Certificate from a medical institution.
A document of the established form from the former employer.

If the documents are drawn up in violation of the law, the employer has the right to reject the application.

If everything is in order, the employer will not be able to refuse, since the scales are tipped in favor of the subordinate. The law in this case clearly protects the rights of the employee: if there is evidence for an increase in payments, and the citizen has substantiated the demands, then his application must be granted.

The statement is drawn up according to the rules that are usually used in business communication. Therefore, the petition states:

details of the enterprise, full name of the manager, applicant;
name of the paper;
request for changes in the billing period;
number and signature;
Help is also included.

There is no statutory time limit for satisfying the applicant's demands, but it must comply with the rules of reasonableness of time. This means that once the request has been received and a decision has been made, the application must be processed.

The requirement must be complied with immediately. This will allow you to avoid misunderstandings with the employee and fines from the state labor inspectorate or the Fund.

The benefit during illness is accrued to the employee on the nearest date of payment of earnings, part 8 of Art. 13, part 1 art. 15 Federal Law No. 255-FZ. If there is a delay in payments, the employee is entitled to additional compensation provided for in Art. 236 Labor Code of the Russian Federation.

Expert opinion

Lebedev Sergey Fedorovich

Practitioner lawyer with 7 years of experience. Specialization: civil law. Extensive experience in defense in court.

As for changing the amount of benefits from the Social Insurance Fund, the application procedure is similar to that outlined. An application is also written addressed to the head of the Fund and the payment document corrected by the employer is attached along with a certificate of incapacity for work and a Certificate.

Following the above recommendations, difficulties with re-registration of the payroll period should not arise, since conscientious employers usually do not prevent their subordinates from exercising this right.

Recalculation of sick leave is permitted provided that an error was made in the initial calculation of the amount due to the employee.

What errors are allowed on a sick leave certificate?

Two categories of people can fill out a sick leave certificate in a way that is not required: the doctor, who fills out the top part, and the employer, who is responsible for filling out the other part of the document. Lawyers and FSS officials have provided their own options for correcting shortcomings for each of these categories.

People are not robots. Apparently, out of understanding of this fact, the social insurance fund has developed a list of inaccuracies that are quite acceptable in certificates of incapacity for work. In particular, FSS specialists will not find fault if:

there are no dashes in empty cells;
there are extra spaces between the doctor’s initials;
symbols touch cell boundaries;
some parts of words are written in cursive;
the address of the hospital or clinic is indicated without a clear sequence;
the seal fell on the information margins;
there are quotation marks in the employer's name;
small blots, like extra periods, commas or checkmarks.

Any other errors are more serious and serve as grounds for refusal of acceptance by FSS specialists and require the issuance of an appropriate duplicate.

Attention! If the sick leave sheet was folded several times or filled out with a blue ballpoint pen instead of a black gel pen, this cannot be a reason for its rejection.

Please note: the admission of two or more insignificant errors or omissions in a hospital bulletin entails its recognition as invalid . Therefore, when filling out this document you should be extremely careful.

Error classification

Recalculation of sick leave Errors made in the bulletin can result in the sick employee being deprived of the opportunity to spend paid time without performing work duties. An enterprise or entrepreneur may refuse to accept a document for payment and will be right. Not all corrections on sick leave are permitted at the legislative level. How to distinguish minor defects that can be ignored, inaccuracies that can be corrected, and errors that require document replacement from each other?

Did you get sick during your probation period? No problem! Find out more about your rights by reading this article.

The most common mistakes in sick leave

As practice shows, there are a number of errors that are especially common when filling out temporary disability forms. These include:

unclear seal of the organization;
incorrect name of the organization;
the name of the organization and the seal do not match;
the specialization of the attending physician is not indicated;
the use of Roman numerals rather than Arabic numerals;
lack of signature of a doctor or representatives of the medical commission;
the sheet contains unnecessary information;
The disease code or date of sick leave was entered incorrectly.

All these and some other errors are, as they say, critical and invariably lead to the issuance of a duplicate.

Important! There is no need to look for a detailed diagnosis in the sick leave certificate - it is not there. Instead, the bulletin contains a specific code, for example: 01 – disease, 02 – injury, etc. Likewise, in some cases, medical organizations have the right not to indicate their profile (in particular, drug treatment centers for the prevention and control of AIDS, psychiatric hospitals, etc.)

For your information! To clarify the significance of the mistake made, you can contact the regional Social Insurance Fund. This will allow you to promptly resolve problems related to inaccurate completion of the temporary disability certificate and avoid possible legal proceedings.

Reasons for recalculating sick leave after payment

The accounting department of an enterprise calculates sick leave based on the data it has. Along with this, they may be incomplete, for example, if a person works part-time or has recently joined a specific company. Considering that the basis is the average daily income for the last two years, it is beneficial for the employee to provide information from previous employers.

This is important to know: How many days can you be sick without sick leave?

Reasons for recalculation

There are several grounds for recalculating already paid temporary disability benefits. These include:

The emergence of new information about the employee’s earnings, for example, receiving certificates of income from previous places of work.
Detection of facts of employee dishonesty - provision of knowingly false information about sick leave or salary.
Errors in calculations made by an accountant.

If management has doubts regarding the authenticity of the submitted documents, then an authorized employee has the right to submit a request to the Social Insurance Fund in order to clarify the information.

Regulations

The regulatory act governing the rules for recalculating sick leave is Article 15, Article 255 of the Federal Law. Let's consider several provisions of the document:

You can apply for benefits within three years after your right to it arises. If the payment did not take place due to the fault of the employer, the period is not limited.
Excessively transferred funds due to the fault of the accounting department will not be recovered from the person.
If inaccurate information about income or sick leave is discovered, leading to an overpayment, the employer has the right to write off up to twenty percent of wages as debt.

All of the above aspects apply to both temporary disability benefits and payments in connection with pregnancy and childbirth.

Billing period

In accordance with Article 14, Article 255 of the Federal Law, the calculation period for calculating sick leave benefits is two calendar years. Moreover, all 730 days are taken into account, without excluding weekends, holidays and other periods.

It is important to know! The period counts from the day the illness or other event subject to insurance began (the need to care for a relative, prosthetics, pregnancy, and so on). If a person had no income or it was less than the minimum wage, then the basis for calculation will be the minimum wage established in the region of residence.

An employee who was on maternity leave in the previous two years has the right to change the calculation period to the one when she worked. You cannot take any years, but only those preceding the insured event associated with the birth of a baby.

The need for a salary certificate

In order to legally recalculate the amount of compensation for the period of incapacity for work, you must provide your current employer with a certificate in Form 182H. It is issued to citizens in two cases:

upon dismissal;
former employees upon written request.

The employee has the right to receive the document for three years; it is during this period that he has the right to apply for disability benefits, which will take into account income from his previous place of work.

It is required to provide either the original certificate or a certified copy of the document (notarized or by the employer himself). Sick leave will be recalculated even if compensation has already been transferred. Based on the information received, the accountant will be able to determine the difference and transfer it to the employee.

If, for objective reasons, an employee cannot obtain a certificate from his former employer, then he submits a request to the Pension Fund for information about his income. This procedure takes more time, but is used in practice. As a rule, this is done if the company where the person worked is liquidated or located in another region.

Correcting errors on sick leave: rules and requirements

If any mistake is made in filling out the sick leave form, there is a strictly defined procedure for correcting it.

The first thing you need to do is use a black gel pen to carefully cross out the corrected entry with a straight, continuous line. Important! If an entire line is written incorrectly, then on the reverse side you need to write that this line is invalid;
Next, you should enter the correct information in the specially designated fields on the back of the sheet;
“Believe the Corrected One”—this resolution must accompany every corrected entry. It must be supported by the signature of the responsible employee and the seal of the organization.

The person responsible for corrections may be:

general director or director of the enterprise;
Chief Accountant;
HR specialist;
any other authorized person whose responsibility is to issue sick leave certificates.

If a sick leave certificate is issued to an employee who works for an individual entrepreneur, then a stamp can be affixed only if it is available. If the individual entrepreneur does not have a seal, which is quite permissible by law, then no additional notes need to be made.

Is it possible to correct blots or errors on a sick leave certificate using a proofreader?

In no case. Clause 65 of Order No. 624n directly objects to this. Such sick leave may not be accepted as a basis for writing off expenses by auditors from the Social Insurance Fund. To avoid having to prove its validity in court, it is better to directly adhere to the established procedure for making corrections.

Is it possible to fix the fix?

It happens that when correcting his own mistake, an employee of the HR or accounting department writes the correct version not where required by law - on the back of the sheet, but next to the error. Such a correction will not be counted; it is also a violation. If this happens, the wrong “fix” needs to be corrected. On the reverse side of the sheet you should write what was supposed to be, accompanied by a note: “Believe the corrected one,” signature and seal.

ATTENTION! If the incorrect format of the correction does not obscure the information field too much and does not interfere with the reading of all necessary records, the FSS may consider this a technical defect and not be too picky. But "fix the fix" would be more reliable.

For your information: in recent years there has been a tendency to relax the requirements of the Social Insurance Fund for issuing sick leave. Minor defects are not a prerequisite for its redesign; the main thing is that the text is readable and understandable.

Information from a former employer

The basis for calculating benefits for LVN is the presence of two documents:

LVN;
salary papers for the past 2 years.

This is important to know: Additional sick leave for pregnancy and childbirth

The paper, which records the amount of income at the previous company (hereinafter referred to as the Certificate), is an important basis for determining the amount of payment in case of disability.

Yes, Art. 13 of Federal Law No. 255-FZ establishes several rules for calculating sick leave funds:

compensation is paid at the current place of work;
if a person is employed in several organizations, then payments are made to each of them in full in accordance with the general calculation rules.

If within two years before the benefit was calculated, the employee was employed in several companies, then the amounts are paid from the funds of the current company based on the salary that the person received over a two-year period (they are displayed in the Certificate).

Expert opinion

Lebedev Sergey Fedorovich

Practitioner lawyer with 7 years of experience. Specialization: civil law. Extensive experience in defense in court.

The form of the paper must comply with the rules established by law. Order of the Ministry of Labor of the Russian Federation dated 2013, as amended 2021 No. 182 n, establishes the form of the certificate and the procedure for its issuance.

Since the legislator has established a unified form, the employer does not have the right to draw up the paper at his own discretion. For convenience, the person responsible for issuing the Certificate in the organization always has a template at hand.

The employee who deals with this issue may be a specialist:

from accounting;
from the HR department.

Therefore, if necessary, an employee should contact these departments of the enterprise to obtain a Certificate.

Errors in registration of sick leave by medical personnel

Sometimes mistakes in filling out sick leave sheets are made by employees of hospitals, clinics and medical centers. In this case, neither employers nor other employees of medical institutions have the right to correct them. Only specialists from the Social Insurance Fund can determine the severity of the error. If they consider this violation to be significant, they will return the document to the organization. After this, the employee who owns the certificate of incapacity for work can contact doctors to issue a duplicate.

Important! A duplicate is the only way to correct a mistake that a doctor made when filling out a sick leave certificate. The previous copy of the document must be cancelled.

It is important that a duplicate is requested and issued in a timely manner. In the event of disputes, judges or auditors may be confused by the long period between the initial issuance of sick leave and its replacement.

Attention! Before starting to enter the necessary information into the employee’s sick leave certificate, the employer must make sure that the notes made by the attending physician are correct.

The doctor made irregularities in the registration

Errors in the new sick leave certificate made by the employer and the medical institution: how to correct

How can an employer correct an error in a new sample sick leave certificate? In order to make a correction on a sick leave certificate, you need to take a black pen and cross out the incorrect entry. On the back of the sheet, what is needed is entered and is accompanied by the phrase “Believe the corrected” (Order of the Ministry of Health and Social Development No. 624 of June 29, 2011). The director puts his personal signature and puts the company seal. As already mentioned, no more than two adjustments are allowed .

Errors in the preparation of sick leave made by the employer

Since there is a part in hospital forms filled out by representatives of medical institutions, and a part filled out by employers, it is not surprising that there are also mistakes that are made by the latter.

Most often, these are inaccurately entered data that prevents them from being read by a machine. That is why the following rules should be strictly adhered to.

Write block letters exclusively within the boundaries of cells;
Start writing only from the leftmost cell and leave one empty cell between words;
In cases where the entry is very long, it can be shortened, but only in such a way that the meaning of what is written is not lost.

If there is an error in calculating benefits, this may serve as a basis for refusing to accept a sick leave certificate from the Social Insurance Fund, about which representatives of the fund will make an appropriate decision.

As a result of all of the above, we can conclude that careful adherence to the rules and regulations for filling out sick leave forms can prevent the occurrence of such unpleasant consequences as refusal to pay compensation for the time spent on sick leave to an employee and the imposition of an administrative penalty on the employer. That is why at all stages of filling out hospital forms, responsible persons should be especially scrupulous and attentive.