Checking sick leave by number online on the FSS website

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A certificate of incapacity for work is needed to confirm that the employee missed work for a good reason. Based on sick leave, temporary disability benefits are issued and the amount of benefits paid by the employer is compensated. If FSS employees discover that the document has been falsified, expenses will not be reimbursed.

There are many sites on the Internet that offer the issuance of a fake certificate of incapacity for work. To protect your organization, verify the authenticity of sick leave.

How to check the authenticity of a sick leave certificate

Any employee who is absent from work due to illness is required to provide the employer with a certificate of incapacity for work.
Within 5 days, the accounting department transfers it to the Social Insurance Fund. See here for details.

We remind you! Since 2021, the FSS pilot project has been operating throughout the Russian Federation. Our experts have prepared a special guide for accountants on direct benefit payments in 2021. Go to this material and see the recommendations of professionals.

If the sick leave is issued in electronic form, the possibility of forgery is excluded.

Since paper sick leave certificates are currently used on a par with electronic ones, risks associated with paper sick leaves remain. If the sick leave turns out to be fake, the Social Insurance Fund will not pay the employee benefits.

To avoid such trouble, the employer should check the authenticity of the document independently. The original document form contains several degrees of protection:

• watermarks with the “FSS of Russia” logo, which are easy to see by shining a light through the document;
• microtext “Certificate of Incapacity for Work”, written on the line under the column “Doctor’s signature”;
• microfibers in paper;
• in the upper right corner on the back of the document is the company name;
• luminous words that are visible when the specimen is illuminated with ultraviolet light;

You can also check the sick leave certificate by number, since it is printed and has irregularities that can be easily felt if you run your finger over them.

For other features of visual verification of the sick leave form, read the material “Sick leave - 10 signs of fraud” .

In addition, you can check the authenticity of the sick leave certificate on the FSS website.

What is the penalty for falsifying sick leave and recording it?

The organization faces nothing but uncompensated losses from payments based on a fake certificate of incapacity for work. They are collected over a long period from the employee’s salary or in a lump sum through the court.

The employee committed fraudulent acts, so the employer has the right to write a statement about forgery of documents. Such offenses are subject to criminal liability (Article 159.2, 327 of the Criminal Code) in the form of a large fine or imprisonment for up to 2 years. But such punishment is initiated only by the leader. If a fake sick leave gets into the hands of FSS employees, they have the right to contact the police and demand the initiation of a criminal case.

Official website of the FSS for checking certificates of incapacity for work

The FSS portal can be found at: portal.fss.ru. However, this site will only help you calculate the amount of benefits payable to the employee, but will not allow you to check your sick leave online.

In order to check the sick leave certificate online at the FSS, you need to go to the official website of the department via the link fss.ru and download the database of invalid forms (for example, stolen or lost).

You will be introduced to the nuances of calculating and paying sick leave by materials and messages prepared by specialists on our website:

• An employee is overdue for an appointment with a doctor - should I pay for sick leave?;
• Payment of sick leave for a domestic injury;
• Sick leave pay after dismissal.

Comments: 14

Your comment (question) If you have questions about this article, you can tell us. Our team consists of only experienced experts and specialists with specialized education. We will try to help you in this topic:

Author of the article Irina Rusanova

Consultant, author Popovich Anna

Financial author Olga Pikhotskaya

1. It's a little cold Lyudmila
   09/04/2021 at 16:19 Good afternoon! The employer returned the sick leave certificate, stating: When requesting a certificate of incapacity for work, an error occurred: ELN with number 400561654346, SNILS 00117710685 is not in the database. Certificate of incapacity for work in paper form. The clinic said that paper sick leave should not be present in the database. What should I do next to get paid sick leave?
   Reply ↓ Anna Popovich
   09/04/2021 at 20:31

   Dear Lyudmila, if there is no sheet in the database, you can submit a written request to the territorial branch of the FSS of Russia at the location of the organization. Please attach a temporary disability certificate to your request.

   Reply ↓

Where to download the database of invalid certificates of incapacity for work in 2021

Social Insurance regularly updates the database of sick leave certificates that have been lost or stolen.

You can check the sick leave number on the FSS website and download the database in the “Information for employers (forms, reporting, forms)” section and find the line “Invalid sick leave forms.” The database is laid out in Excel format. To find the number you are looking for, you can use the “Find” service and enter the first 9 digits of the code designation of the number of the certificate of incapacity for work.

There is no other way to check sick leave by number online on the department’s website.

At the territorial office of the Social Insurance Fund, checking sick leave by number is also possible (this is provided for in paragraph 7 of Article 59 of the Law “On the Protection of the Health of Citizens in the Russian Federation” dated November 21, 2011 No. 323-FZ). To do this, you can contact the branch at the place of registration with a request to check the suspicious document by number, attaching the document itself. The FSS records the numbers of the forms that were received by each medical institution. Consequently, branch employees can determine whether the copy number belongs to the organization that issued it.

Is it possible to fire an employee if an inspection by the Social Insurance Fund reveals a fake sick leave? The answer to this question is in ConsultantPlus. Get trial access to the system and start learning the material for free.

Why is authentication important?

If you pay benefits using a false document, the company will not receive compensation from the Social Insurance Fund.

Currently, a pilot project is operating in most regions: territorial bodies of the Social Insurance Fund directly pay benefits for temporary disability. Employers from regions that do not participate in the pilot project continue to assign and pay benefits themselves, which are then reimbursed by the Social Insurance Fund.

To receive compensation, sick leave must be issued according to the following rules:

• The certificate of incapacity for work is drawn up by a doctor of the correct specialization.
• The doctor works in a medical institution with a FSS license.

For example, a sick leave certificate issued by a sanatorium or blood transfusion station will be fake. Suspicion will be raised by a document with a diagnosis of acute respiratory infections, which was made and certified by an oncologist.

Letter to the Social Insurance Fund about checking sick leave if the check on the portal did not produce results (sample)

A request to the Social Insurance Fund to verify sick leave is made in any order and must contain the following information:

• about the policyholder: company name, INN/KPP/registration number in the Social Insurance Fund, legal address and telephone number;
• to whom, by whom and when issued, as well as the number of the certificate of incapacity for work;
• where and how the fund should send the response;
• about applications;
• signature of the head of the company and date of preparation.

The original sick leave certificate must be attached to the application. After verification, the department will return it.

Applications can be made on our website.

Since the FSS has the right to prepare a response within up to 30 days, you can contact a medical organization to check the authenticity of the sick leave. The request form is free. An example of the wording can be found in the Ready-made solution from ConsultantPlus, having received trial access to the system for free.

What to do if the sick leave is fake

If you submit a fake sick leave, there are two scenarios:

1. If the forgery is detected immediately and payment for such a certificate of incapacity does not go through. Everything is simple here. The organization loses nothing, declares the forgery at its own discretion, and punishes the culprit at its discretion.
2. If the accountant processed and paid for a fake sick leave. Usually such violations are detected by the FSS. If payment is made, the FSS will simply compensate the policyholder’s expenses. The employer recovers damages from the employee, but the amount of recovery cannot exceed 20% of his earnings. Anything more is collected through the court.

What to do with the violator depends on the decision of management. If the manager is loyal to the employee, he will limit himself to a warning. You cannot be fired for providing a fake sick leave certificate.

Results

Checking sick leave in the Social Insurance Fund is possible on the official social insurance website, using a regularly updated database of lost forms, or at the territorial authority at the employer’s place of registration by sending an official request. The department does not provide other ways to check sick leave online.

Sources: Federal Law of November 21, 2011 N 323-FZ “On the fundamentals of protecting the health of citizens in the Russian Federation”

You can find more complete information on the topic in ConsultantPlus. Free trial access to the system for 2 days.

Convenience of issuing an EBL compared to the paper version

The electronic version of the sick leave has a number of advantages that its paper “brother” does not have:

• filling doesn't take long
• EBL is reliably protected from counterfeiting, loss, and damage.;
• there is no need to certify with a seal.

It is not given to the patient: in return, he receives a coupon confirming the registration of the sick leave in electronic form.

Checking electronic sick leave

From 07/01/2017 in the Russian Federation it was allowed to use this type of sick leave as electronic, that is, generated in a special system. According to the FSS, the share of sick leave certificates issued in the form of an electronic document is now 50% in some regions, and in every fourth case small businesses submit electronic sick leave certificates to the Fund. But only a year and a half has passed, and in many regions both workers and employers have already appreciated the advantage of paperless data exchange and are gradually switching to electronic document management.

Officials assure that it is impossible to falsify the number or the sick leave certificate itself, generated in the official state database. They emphasize that information is controlled from the moment the document is opened, is protected, third parties do not have access to it, and during the entire period of operation of the system there has not been a single failure or violation of order. So there is nothing to check here, the FSS reassures.