COVID-19: temporary changes in sick lists

LEGAL DIGEST, NEWS \ 20.04.2020

Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to the changes made at the beginning of 2020, temporary rules on accrual of sick leaves were introduced. Below, Acsour experts will tell you more about how to accrue and to whom to issue medical sick leave certificates during the period of coronavirus infection.

According to Government decree No. 294 dated 18/3/2020, temporary disability leaves are issued due to being quarantined owing to the spread of COVID-19. These changes are effective from March 20 to July 1, 2020. The sick leave is fully paid at the expense of the Social Insurance Fund. The measures introduced are applied only to the group of citizens who have returned to Russia from countries with registered cases of coronavirus infection, as well as citizens living with them. Temporary disability allowances are paid on the basis of a temporary disability leave. An electronic sick list is drawn up by the employee through the Social Insurance Fund information system.

To draw up through the Social Insurance Fund system, it is necessary to pre-register on the state services portal. The employee’s personal account on the Social Insurance Fund website provides basic information about the insured (full name, date of birth, address of the place of residence/stay, Personal Insurance Policy Number (Russian acronym – SNILS), Obligatory Medical Insurance policy, foreign passport data) and a scanned copies of the foreign passport (page with data and pages with stamps of crossing the Russian border). If there are no border crossing marks, travel documents confirming the stay in another state are necessary.

The procedure for payment of temporary disability allowance due to coronavirus infection is as follows:

• For the period of the first seven calendar days of sick leave, payment is made within one working day from the date of receipt of data on electronic sick leave until the seventh day of temporary disability, inclusively.
• The next days of sick leave are paid from the date of the end of temporary disability also within one working day.

The Government decree dated April 1, 2020 made temporary adjustments to the procedure for calculating sick leaves. Now the daily allowance is calculated based on the minimum living wage. It is not necessary to take into account the employee’s length of pensionable service. These changes will be in effect until December 31, 2020, inclusively.

If you have any questions concerning temporary changes in the calculation of sick leaves, Acsour is ready to provide you with timely assistance in explaining the changes in detail, as well as implementing changes in your working process. When you transfer the process of calculating and accruing temporary disability allowances to our specialists on a permanent basis, you release yourself from work that requires a lot of labour inputs and up-to-date knowledge not only in matters of calculations, but also tax and employment legislation. Our employees use a personalized approach when performing the provision of this service, because when calculating sick leave, it is necessary to take into account not only the employee’s length of employment, but also the specifics of the industry in which the company operates.