Electronic sick leave - instructions for employers

Have the functions of the HR officer changed with the introduction of virtual sick leave?

With the advent of electronic sick leave, there have been no fundamental changes in the work of personnel officers.
Their functions still include filling out the necessary data on the sick leave certificate: about the length of insurance, the conditions for calculating benefits, etc. The list of information filled out by the personnel officer on the sick leave certificate is established by an internal company local act (regulations, instructions, orders). Currently, HR officers may be faced with both paper and electronic sick leave certificates at the same time, so when filling them out, it is important not to forget the basic rules for their execution.

ConsultantPlus experts explained step by step the rules for working with electronic sick leave. Study the material by getting trial access to the K+ system for free.

For both forms of sick leave, there are legally established restrictions and conditions for registration.

A sick leave issued on paper is filled out:

in capital letters in Russian;
black ink (or using printing devices);
according to the rule: one cell - one character or letter.

The contents of the sections and lines of the sick leave sheet can be found here.

For the electronic sick leave form, the color of the ink does not matter - all information is filled out on the computer. However, electronic sick leave is issued with some restrictions:

the health worker will issue it only if the patient gives his written consent to this;
filling out an electronic certificate of incapacity for work is possible only in those medical institutions that have special software, access to the Internet, and are also connected to the regional medical information system;
The patient’s employer has drawn up an agreement with the Social Insurance Fund on information interaction, registered on the government services website, opened a personal account on the website cabinets.fss.ru and received an enhanced electronic signature.

Is an employer obligated to accept electronic sick leave? Read here.

Regardless of the form of the certificate of incapacity for work, two main parts must be filled in:

one is filled out by a medical institution employee;
the second - by the employer.

In the following sections, we will focus on the new form of (electronic) sick leave, which will allow us to study in more detail the question “What is an electronic sick leave and how does it work for personnel officers?”

How does an electronic sick leave work?

The possibility of issuing an electronic sheet is provided for by the Law “On Amendments...” dated May 1, 2017 No. 86-FZ. The transition to an electronic form of interaction between the employer and the medical institution with the Social Insurance Fund was preceded by large-scale informatization of the healthcare system, without which it would not have been possible to establish electronic document flow.

For details, see the material “Electronic sick leave for transfer to the Social Insurance Fund online.”

For a medical institution employee registering an electronic sick leave, the action plan is as follows:

entering information about the patient and the diagnosis into a special program on the computer (in the “Electronic Medical Record” module);
part of the necessary data on the sick leave certificate comes from the electronic medical record, and the remaining information is supplemented by the health worker when filling out an electronic image of the certificate of incapacity for work (in the module “Certificate of Incapacity for Work”);
signing the sick leave with an electronic signature and sending it to the Uniform State Health Information System (unified state information system in the field of healthcare).

The following procedure for obtaining electronic sick leave is provided for an employee (patient):

give written consent to fill out sick leave electronically;
obtain a sick leave number from the medical staff;
provide the sick leave number to the employer (HR or accounting specialists).

For information about the employer’s functions in the procedure for working with electronic sick leave, see below.

Uploading a finished file into the system

Click the “Load from file” button.

In the window that opens, select a file and click “Open”. The file accepted into the system must be generated in the format established by the FSS and have an xml extension.

The uploaded documents will appear in the list. To check a document and send it to the FSS, click on the line with the required document. A form for editing and submitting will open.

Choosing a system for working with certificates of incapacity for work

The company has the right to choose a scheme for working with certificates of incapacity:

traditional (the current system of working with paper sick leave);
virtual (paperless technology for information interaction with the Social Insurance Fund).

Currently, paper and electronic sick leave have the same legal force, and employers are given the right to choose the system for working with them.

What to do if an employee brings an electronic sick leave (ES), and your company has not yet connected to the system for working with the ES, find out here.

Read how to transfer to electronic sick leave here.

The use of the traditional system does not relieve the employer of fake sick leave certificates and the need to store sick leave.

Find out how to recognize a fake sick leave certificate from the article “Actions of an employer with a fake sick leave certificate.”

Paper sick leave may contain errors made by both the medical institution and the policyholder - this can serve as an obstacle to the timely payment of benefits.

In electronic sick notes, errors are practically eliminated (or minimal and quickly corrected), and the existence of fake certificates of incapacity for work is impossible in principle. In addition, the possibility of loss or damage to the electronic certificate of incapacity for work is excluded.

The introduction of electronic sick leave retained the employer’s obligation to fill out its section of the sick leave sheet. Its contents are similar to the paper form of this document.

Please note that starting from 2021, all regions have switched to the FSS pilot project. That is, the employer only pays for the first 3 days of illness. The remaining days are paid by the Social Insurance Fund directly to the employee. To do this, you need to send a package of documents to the fund for payment of benefits.

Find out how to do this correctly in ConsultantPlus. To do this, get trial access to the system and go to the Ready solution. It's free.

Find out what information the HR officer and accountant should fill out in their section of the paper sick leave from the material “An example of filling out a sick leave by an employer.”

Transfer of documents to the Social Insurance Fund for payment of sick leave benefits

From the moment an employee applies for sick leave benefits, the employer has 5 working days to generate and send to the Social Insurance Fund a complete set of documents for the assignment and payment of this benefit (clause 3 of the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation of December 30, 2020 No. 2375).

Such documents include an application, sick leave, information about the employee’s average earnings for calculating sick leave and a list of these documents.

The form in which the above documents and information are submitted to the Social Insurance Fund depends on the number of employees working for the employer. Employers with an average number of employees up to 25 people inclusive can send these documents by registered mail. If the number of the employer’s employees exceeds 25 people, then instead of a package of documents, he sends an electronic register of information to the Social Insurance Fund (clause 4 of the regulation, approved by Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation dated April 21, 2011 No. 294).

The FSS will pay the rest of the benefit to the employee within 10 calendar days from the moment the fund receives documents or a register of information from the employer. The benefit will be transferred to a bank account or through the federal postal service at the employee’s choice.

Where is sick leave paid in 2021 - to the Mir card or any other card?

Employer functions for working with electronic sick leave

The actions of personnel officers to fill out an electronic sick leave form are not described in federal regulations. And some companies do not have a personnel officer position on their staff, and his functions are performed by an accountant or other specialist. The number and composition of employees participating in the registration of electronic sick leave, as well as other necessary regulations, are prescribed and approved by the company at its discretion.

When working with electronic sick leave, the employer must consider the following:

You can process an electronic certificate of incapacity for work through your personal account on the website cabinets.fss.ru, which can be accessed using the login and password from your account on the government services website;
after logging into your personal account, you need to select an electronic signature certificate from the list offered by the system;
the first tab “Electronic certificates of incapacity for work” contains information about the employee’s full name, his SNILS, number of the certificate of incapacity for work, date of issue and period of incapacity for work, as well as the status of the electronic sick leave (“Benefit paid” or “Filled out by the policyholder”);
to fill in the missing data in the electronic sick leave, you need to find the required sheet in the proposed list and click the “Get LN” button;
in the electronic sick leave form that opens, find the “To be filled out by the employer” tab and fill in the data for calculating benefits, save the information by clicking the appropriate button;
upon receipt of an error notification from the fund, it is necessary to correct the data or send additional documents;
You can track the status of the certificate of incapacity for work using special journals: data exchange, registers and benefits (each journal is located in a separate tab on the main page).

Is it necessary to work through your personal account on the FSS website? Find out here.

The material “Accident at Work - Actions of the Employer” will tell you about the functions of the employer in a situation where an employee has lost his health at work.

Processing statuses

“Created” - the document was created, but not sent to the FSS. The date and time the document was last modified is indicated.
“Queued for sending” - the document is queued for sending to the Social Insurance Fund.
“Submit Error”—errors occurred during the document sending process. You need to send the document to the FSS again. To do this, click on the line with the document and click “Send again”.
“Not accepted by the FSS” - as a result of checking the document in the FSS, errors were identified. You should correct the errors indicated in the FSS protocol and resend the document.
“Accepted by the FSS” - the document is sent for consideration to the regional office of the FSS. The receipt can be viewed and printed.

If errors are found during the check at the regional office of the FSS, the notification should be received by Russian Post. In this case, you should make the required changes to the document and send it to the FSS.

Results

Electronic and paper sick leave are legally equivalent documents.
With the introduction of electronic document flow between the medical institution, the employer and the Social Insurance Fund, personnel officers and accountants still need to fill out their part of the certificate of incapacity for work. To do this, the company must register on the government services website and, using the received password and login, enter your personal account on the website cabinets.fss.ru - in this electronic service the employer processes sick leave. Electronic sick leave allows you to create a “transparent” system of compulsory social insurance and completely eliminates the submission of fake certificates of incapacity by insured persons. You can find more complete information on the topic in ConsultantPlus. Free trial access to the system for 2 days.