What to do if you have lost your sick leave? Rules for issuing a duplicate sick leave

Reinstatement of a certificate of incapacity for work if it is lost by an employee

Contacting a medical facility

If the sick leave certificate was lost by the owner himself, then it will be necessary to apply for a duplicate at the same medical institution where the original was received. The basis for issuing a duplicate, in addition to loss, may also be the incorrect completion of the form, as a result of which it was rejected.

But before going to a medical institution, you need to take a certificate from work stating that you did not provide sick leave, and you will also need to have a passport with you to confirm your identity.

Then, when you apply for a duplicate, a committee will meet at the hospital to resolve your issue. The commission must establish the number of the certificate of incapacity issued to the patient, as well as the information that was indicated on it. Each certificate of incapacity for work receives its own number, which is entered into the database, as a result of which it can be restored in full.

When this is done, the commission makes a decision on the need to issue a duplicate, and the collected information is transferred to the doctor in a protocol act, on the basis of which he will issue a duplicate.

If the form was not lost, but damaged, then it must be replaced. In addition to mechanical damage, a document in which the doctor made errors when filling out will also be considered damaged. There is an acceptable mistake - not quite correct indication of the place of work. The fact is that such an error will not be critical for the employer, because he can simply make corrections himself, already in his part of the form. But there is a nuance here: it’s one thing if it’s just a mistake, and another if, instead of the real employer, another organization is indicated, also registered with the Social Insurance Fund. Then you need to apply for a duplicate - such a mistake is no longer acceptable.

Getting a duplicate

After the doctor has all the necessary information to fill out, he must issue a duplicate. The requirements for filling it out are the same as for the original document, the difference is that there is no need to rewrite all periods of sick leave extension. Instead, you should only indicate the dates of its opening and closing. You can either fill out the duplicate by hand or type it on a computer. Empty cells for renewals must be crossed out and a V must be placed in the “duplicate” column.

After filling out the document, the doctor signs it and puts a new date on it, and it is also signed by a medical commission, which checks that there are no mistakes this time.

The duplicate can then be used as a full-fledged document, no different from the lost original, and on its basis all necessary payments must be made in the same way.

Loss of sick leave: consequences

The fact of loss of a document does not have legal consequences. But the payment of benefits will be delayed exactly the same number of days as it takes to recover. It does not matter who is to blame for this fact; you must contact the medical institution where the initial sheet was originally issued.

The benefit is accrued within 10 days from the calendar date when the sheet is brought to the accounting department. Cash is issued on the next payday. It is important to understand what to do if you lose your sick leave in order to receive your compensation for sick days on time.

Loss of sick leave by the employer

But what to do if the sick leave was lost due to the fault of the employer? Since this happened after the document was registered, the procedure will differ from that described earlier. It is necessary to assemble a commission at the enterprise that will investigate exactly how and why the loss occurred.

It is required that sick leaves be kept by the employing company for at least five years, and if the commission determines that the loss was due to the fault of the enterprise, there are two main options:

or one of the employees is at fault;
or the reason was an emergency.

In the first case, the company pays compensation to the victim, and the guilty employee, in turn, pays the expenses incurred by the company because of him.

In the second case, the company contacts the hospital for a duplicate. The basis for the appeal is a certificate of what happened. Emergencies include fires, floods and other natural disasters, accidents at an enterprise - an act from a specialist in the relevant field will need to confirm that exactly this kind of incident happened.

Note: if the sick leave certificate was lost due to the fault of the employer, but it is impossible to replace it with a duplicate for some reason, the employee must still receive the payments due to him on the basis of other documents.

Documentary proof of loss

Since a sick leave certificate is a document, its loss can lead to adverse consequences (of course, if this document has not expired - read more about the period for which sick leave is issued).

Losing sick leave is a serious violation, especially if it was due to the fault of an accounting employee. After such an incident, the head of the enterprise must sign an order to create an investigation commission that will identify all the factors of the incident.

The commission will document and certify the fact of loss, and after verification, management will submit a request for a duplicate sick leave to the medical institution.

Loss of a document by a medical institution

If a sick leave certificate is lost directly in the hospital due to the fault of its employees, then the citizen needs to write an application for a duplicate, then a commission will be passed and the document will be issued.

If a replacement is necessary due to damage to the form, you should issue it again, but at the same time strictly observing all the filling out requirements. It's worth remembering the following:

It is not allowed to use a ballpoint pen for filling, while capillary, gel, etc. pens can be used.
The ink must be black.
Entries are made in block letters.
The text must remain within the designated cells.
If there are errors in it, then a new document must be drawn up.

In fact, quite often these requirements are not met, and responsible employees of the employing organization do not make complaints about such matters. But if it was necessary to replace the document because it was drawn up incorrectly, then the responsible employees are most likely extremely demanding in terms of execution, and in this case you need to know all these rules so that you do not have to re-issue the sick leave a third time.

Document recovery

The loss of a closed certificate of incapacity for work does not mean that the employee will no longer receive benefits. It is necessary to undertake restoration and issue a new form, which will be marked as a duplicate. All actions are regulated.

Obtaining a second copy of the sick leave is required if the money has not yet been transferred to the employee. If the payment has already been made, then there is no point in restoring it.

There are legitimate reasons for refusing to issue a secondary document. The main one is this: the applicant did not provide a certificate from his management stating that the funds were not transferred to him. Upon presentation of this paper, the former patient does not have the right to refuse. You need to know what to do if a medical institution does not agree to issue a repeat document. Complain to the FSS!

Legal basis

All recovery steps are specified in the Procedure for the initial issuance. Incorrect registration may lead to denial of compensation for days of incapacity for work. Therefore, the doctor must fill out all fields correctly.

Procedure for issuing a duplicate

You must contact the health care organization that issued the primary document. It is better to visit the same doctor from whom the employee received treatment. If this is not possible for any reason, then you need to go to an authorized doctor.

Attention! The doctor has the right to demand from the applicant a certificate from the employer confirming the absence of payments for missed days. Management is obliged to provide it within 3 days from the date of writing the request. Based on this, a duplicate sick leave certificate will be issued.

The form must be filled out taking into account the same recommendations as the original document. Only in the “duplicate” column you will have to check the box. The sick leave will have a different series and number, but its legal force is exactly the same as the main sheet.

The document was lost by the employee

Both the employee and the employer himself may be to blame for the incident. When a worker has lost his medical certificate, he needs to contact the health care organization where he received treatment. You need to have with you the main document of a citizen of the Russian Federation and a certificate from the management about the absence of payments for lost sick leave.

There are certain requirements for the certificate:

Issued on the company’s letterhead (if there is none, then on a regular sheet) indicating basic data - full and abbreviated name of the enterprise, full name of the manager, address of location.
It is certified by the signatures of the company’s management and accounting department, as well as two main seals.
Contains an indication that the funds were not given due to the loss of the form.

If the certificate is completed incorrectly, it will not be accepted. Consequently, compensation will not be transferred to the employee. After registering a written request from a former patient for the issuance of a secondary document, a medical commission is convened, and it makes a positive or negative decision.

To quickly receive a duplicate, you must provide the details of the lost document. If they are absent, the process may take several days. The commission makes a decision in favor of the former patient. Information about re-issuance is entered into the patient’s record and into a single database.

Sick leave was lost due to the fault of the employer

All certificates of incapacity for work must be recorded by the company and must be kept for 5 years. But, if a loss is discovered, the following actions must be taken to restore:

It is necessary to assemble a commission of those who occupy leadership positions - director, chief accountant, head of human resources.
The commission must find out the reasons for what happened.
It is also necessary to identify the culprit. There are two options - loss due to force majeure or the fault of one of the employees. Emergency situations include fire, flood, man-made or other disaster, and other cases.

Regardless of the reason for the loss, you must contact the medical organization that issued the primary document. You must present a report on what happened, drawn up on the basis of the commission meeting. According to it, the medical institution will issue a duplicate of the sick leave.

All payments must be made in full. If it is determined that a specific employee is to blame for the loss of the document, then it is necessary to recover from him the costs that the employer incurred to obtain a duplicate.

If the employees of the medical institution are to blame

Employees of a medical institution may also be to blame for the loss of sick leave. If such circumstances exist, you need to write an application for a duplicate and obtain it from the chairman of the medical commission. If the attending physician messes up the form when filling it out, you must issue a new one. Make an appropriate entry about the damage. When preparing a new document, the following requirements are met:

You cannot use a ballpoint pen. But you can use feather, gel or capillary.
Only black ink can be used.
All entries must be made in block letters.
You cannot go beyond the lines.

If these requirements are not met, the sick leave is considered spoiled.

If the employer or FSS employees discover that the document was filled out in violation, they must contact the medical institution to correct the errors. The employee is paid benefits in full and without delay. It’s not his fault what happened!

When it's no one's fault

Sick leave may be lost due to circumstances that are in no way dependent on the will of the person. These are cases such as fire, flood, and other natural disasters. If such an incident occurred, the procedure for issuing a duplicate is as follows:

convening a commission at the enterprise;
drawing up a report on what happened;
contacting a medical institution with an act to issue a duplicate.

It is important to know! If benefits have already been paid for lost sick leave, then issuing secondary documents does not make sense.

Electronic forms

To minimize the risk of losing sick leave, electronic sick leave certificates have been introduced over the past few years and are becoming increasingly widespread. It is expected that over time they will completely replace paper ones, which will allow you to no longer bother with the restoration of this document - after all, if necessary, even if the electronic version is suddenly lost, you can always apply for a copy of it, and not necessarily even to the hospital, since it is also sent to the department FSS. No fees or data recovery will be required. For the employer, this also brings a lot of advantages - first of all, there is no need to keep a special archive in which papers will be stored for the required period; there is no need to involve and pay employees for this.

We emphasize that the electronic sick leave has the same legal force as the paper version - there is no difference in this sense, and it is just as valid when presented, it must be paid in the same way.

If you have lost an open sick leave

A sick leave certificate is an important document that allows an employee to go on vacation due to temporary disability, as well as receive the necessary monetary payments. But there are situations in which, due to certain circumstances, this document is lost. What to do in this case? If trouble in the form of loss of a certificate of incapacity for work does occur, it is necessary to immediately take measures to restore it. To do this, you need to know where to go and what to do to restore your sick leave. First, an employee who has lost his sick leave must go to a local clinic or hospital. It is at the medical institution that an analogue of a sick leave certificate is issued. Only the chairman of the medical commission or the chief physician can assure him. The applying employee must have the following documents with him, without which it will be impossible to obtain a copy:.

When is it possible to refuse to receive a duplicate?

Although in most situations, according to the law, a citizen will be able to obtain a duplicate sick leave certificate if such a need arises, there are still others in which its issuance may be refused. Most often, a situation of this kind arises if the original document was lost due to the negligence of the employee responsible for its storage. Then it is he who will have to pay compensation, since payment comes from other sources, and not from the Social Insurance Fund, and a duplicate sick leave certificate will not be needed. The second case is the absence of a certificate from the place of work, which would confirm that the sick leave has not already been received.

In general, the employee himself, to whom the document was issued, usually does not lose the money due to him, even if the loss occurred because of him, but sometimes you have to lose time to restore the documents. Therefore, you should try to avoid losses, and initially be careful about filling out the document. So, if you know about the strictness of the employees receiving it in the company, do not hesitate to make a remark to the doctor so that he brings its registration in accordance with the standards. After all, it is you who then, if necessary, will have to waste time to correct it. Moreover: even if the employer’s receiving employees do not have any comments, they may already end up with FSS employees, which also risks wasting time on issuing a new certificate.

Thus, if a citizen has lost a sick leave certificate, the actions will vary depending on whose fault the loss occurred, but it will be possible to receive all the required payments, even though this will most likely require registration of a duplicate at the hospital.

Where to go

To restore an official certificate of days of incapacity for work, you need to contact the medical institution that issued the initial form. If the patient was treated remotely, at home, then the form was issued by the clinic by the local general practitioner, which means that only he can duplicate it. When receiving treatment in a hospital, it is necessary to contact the hospital where the patient was hospitalized and undergoing recovery.

Not only the medical institutions must match, but also the very personality of the attending physician. Each disability form has an individual barcode, which determines, in particular, which doctor it was issued to. It is this doctor who is responsible for the issued ballot, which means that only he can issue a duplicate paper. Of course, in some cases, for example, in the temporary absence of the required doctor or his dismissal, a replacement is issued by another medical representative.

In fact, the person who lost it is obliged to contact the registry of the medical institution with the appropriate package of documents, and further restoration occurs without his participation. This procedure allows the patient to save time searching for the right specialist to restore the lost form.

The essence of the dispute

During an on-site inspection of social insurance, it was established that the company paid temporary disability benefits to employees, reimbursing part of the expenses from the fund, based on a copy of the stubs of certificates of incapacity for work, copies of employee pay slips, as well as a letter from a medical institution. It contained information about sick leave certificates issued, indicating series and numbers, full names of employees, and periods of their incapacity for work (the fact is that the original sick leave certificates were lost).

However, officials said that benefits are reimbursed only if original sick leave documents are available. In doing so, they gave the following arguments.

Part 5 of Article 13 of the Federal Law of December 29, 2006 No. 255-FZ “On compulsory social insurance in case of temporary disability...” stipulates that in order to assign and pay benefits, the insured person submits a certificate of incapacity for work issued by a medical organization in the prescribed form.

And as stated in subparagraph 3 of paragraph 1 of Article 11 of the Federal Law of July 16, 1999 No. 165-FZ “On the Fundamentals of Compulsory Social Insurance,” funds have the right not to take into account expenses for compulsory social insurance made in violation of the law.

According to officials of the Social Insurance Fund, the records of medical institutions can only establish the fact of the occurrence of temporary disability (an insured event), and not the correctness of the assignment, calculation and payment of benefits.

On this basis, the fund did not take into account the costs of paying benefits.

By the way, the same position is expressed in the letter of the FSS of Russia dated July 17, 2013 No. 15-03-11/12-7761. It says that if the certificate of incapacity for work submitted by the employee was paid, but then lost due to the fault of the employer, then the policyholder is deprived of the right to reimbursement of the paid benefits.

What is a duplicate?

A duplicate of a sick leave certificate is considered the same legal document on the basis of which compensation for the time spent on sick leave for the entire period of treatment occurs. It often becomes necessary for people, after receiving the primary document, to take a duplicate. Is it possible to restore sick leave if lost?

Issuance of a duplicate sick leave certificate is possible only in two situations: incorrect completion or loss. If this is the second case, but it is also divided into loss by the employer or employee. But there is also such a situation as force majeure circumstances with the employer.

With the appropriate conclusion, the medical institution has the right to issue duplicates.

What is a duplicate?

A certificate of incapacity for work is issued by a medical institution that has a licensed right to do so . The employee provides sick leave, confirming the fact and period of his stay for treatment, to the accounting department of the employer organization in order to receive monetary compensation for the time of forced non-fulfillment of work duties.

The procedure for issuing sick leave and the rules for filling it out are determined by Order of the Ministry of Health and Social Development of Russia No. 624n. According to paragraph 56, errors made when filling out a document about a previous illness are grounds for issuing a duplicate certificate of incapacity for work. Thus, any employee, as well as an employer, have the right to receive a duplicate to replace a damaged document.

Loss or unintentional destruction, for example, during natural disasters, of a sick leave becomes a reason to obtain a second copy.

There are significant differences between the original standard form confirming the period of incapacity for work and the duplicate:

presence of a tick in the corresponding column “original” or “duplicate”;
the period of treatment in the repeated document is indicated in one line without dividing into intervals between visits to the medical organization.

Attention! The date of issue of the duplicate is indicated according to the actual date of its discharge, and differs from the calendar day that was indicated on the initial sick leave.

How to get a duplicate of a sick leave note if it is lost?

The employer has lost sick leave - what to do in such a situation? The ruling of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation dated December 28, 2016 No. 305-KG16-17521 again confirms the position that a duplicate of a lost sick leave is not issued to an organization, but at the same time there are documents that can be used to confirm the legality of the accrual of benefits.

Such documents may be:

letters from the medical institution with all the details of the lost sick leave form, as well as the individual’s data and information about the illness;
copies of the counterfoils of issued certificates of incapacity for work.

Numerous court decisions show that reimbursement of paid benefits is possible not only on the basis of sick leave. For example, the Federal Antimonopoly Service of the Ural District came to similar conclusions in its resolution dated June 28, 2013 No. F09-6578/13 in case No. A60-40210/2012.

The AS of the Moscow District, in a resolution dated 08/03/2017 in case No. A40-22485/2017, established that the insurer did not have an employee’s sick leave certificate, there was only a certificate from the Ministry of Internal Affairs about the loss of this document by the chief accountant, but the medical institution received a certificate confirming the issuance of a certificate of incapacity for work and recording its content. The court concluded that the law “On compulsory social insurance in case of temporary disability and in connection with maternity” dated December 29, 2006 No. 255-FZ does not make the insurer’s right to compensation for social payments dependent on the failure to provide certain copies of documents. According to the judges, in this case, the employer confirmed with another document the right to reimbursement of funds paid under the certificate of incapacity for work.

Read about how to calculate benefits in the material “Sample certificate of calculation for sick leave”.

Loss of the form due to the fault of the employer

What to do if your employer has lost your sick leave? If the loss of the certificate of incapacity for work occurred before it was provided to the employer, the person can contact a medical institution and get a duplicate.

If this happened later, then a commission meets at the enterprise to resolve this issue and clarify the reasons or circumstances. There can be many reasons, from simple negligence to force majeure circumstances.

All certificates of incapacity for work are kept in the institution for five years. If the document is lost, the company pays compensation to the employee, and the person responsible for storing the documentation pays the company’s expenses.

It must be remembered that an employee who has been paid sick leave is not obliged to answer for the actions of the responsible persons and return compensation.

How to get a duplicate sick leave certificate to replace a damaged one? In case of force majeure circumstances, such as fire, flood, injury at an enterprise, natural disasters, a special commission is convened, after which an act is drawn up asking the medical institution to issue a duplicate.

Such circumstances are considered valid, and with the help of a medical commission, the company is issued a duplicate. But a natural disaster must be confirmed in the form of a signed act by the specialist responsible for it. For example, such a person could be an employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

All duplicates are recorded in a specialized internal reporting program . The employer can request all data in order to verify the authenticity of the sick leave certificate and its duplicate.