A regulation giving inspectors from the Social Insurance Company to start monitoring people who are on sick leave and general practitioners who write out sick leave form goes into effect Monday.
In this manner, the Social Insurance Company (ZUS) wants to reduce the number of ‘sick benefits’ granted to healthy people. Since the beginning of the financial crisis, more and more people have taken sick leaves in fear of being made redundant.
It is more profitable for workers to go on ‘sick leave’ because an unemployment benefit is 575 zlotys (140 euros) while a health benefit amounts to 80 percent of one’s salary. Some companies also send their employees on compulsory ‘sick leaves’ as they do not want to lose a qualified work force but, at the same time, cannot afford to pay a whole salary.
ZUS pays for all health benefits, according to Poland’s health-care system. During the first half of 2009, the company spent 3.2 billion zloty (777 million euro) on health benefits, which is 43.7 percent more than a year ago. Because of the growing number of people who take health benefits and the unemployed who pay lower insurance fees, the Social Insurance Company’s budget is already leaky. It is estimated that ZUS faces a deficit of 5-8 billion zloty (1.2-1.9 billion euro).
Prime Minister Donald Tusk has ordered a special audit of ZUS’s expenditures. Sylwester Rypinski, the Social Insurance Company’s head, announced that its inspectors will monitor doctors who wrote out a record number of sick leave forms, people who were frequently on sick leaves, who visited several doctors and received sick leaves on several different sicknesses and those who had been caught with a fake sick leave form.
If ZUS inspectors prove that health benefits were granted illegally, a person on sick leave will have to return the money and go back to work, and a doctor who is proven to have written a false sick leave form may lose the right to issue such a document.
Fake sick leaves are issued throughout Poland in vast quantities. In the north-eastern city of Bialystok itself, 121,000 people went on a sick leave this year, in comparison with 74,000 last year. For ZUS, it is not a secret why the number of people on sick leaves has grown so dramatically. In May the Railway Rolling Stock Repair Company decided to make half of its 750 workers redundant, so many of them took a sick leave. Similar situation happened when, in June, Polish National Railways PKP Cargo made redundant 165 of its workers. (mg/mmj)