Employers are more often knocking on the door of company detectives to check sick reports | Economy

An employer who sounds the alarm about a sick employee: ‘Piet is home sick, but we hear that he gets on his bus every day to do a job’. A report from another entrepreneur: ‘Our healthcare employee has reported sick, but we have received signals that she works as a self-employed person at other healthcare institutions’. And also: ‘This man has been sick twelve times in the past two years, often for three weeks in a row. I’m starting to get tired of it, I think something isn’t right here’.

Ron Nieuwendijk, Fraud & Integrity consultant at Hoffmann, receives three to five reports a week from employers who suspect that an employee is abusing his or her illness and who request further investigation.

It is up to Hoffmann to determine whether such an investigation is actually initiated. If so, company detectives will investigate: they scour the internet, for example to see whether a sick employee has recently shared anything relevant on social media. Or post in the vicinity of the home of the employee in question. “It may also be that they go to a specific place, such as with the report of Piet who is said to be standing on a scaffolding at a construction site with a brush in hand.”

An investigation is a heavy means and sometimes the last straw for employers. It is striking: this year the number of applications increased by 11 percent compared to the same period last year. Requests come from all sectors, but according to Nieuwendijk, production companies and healthcare stand out. Even more striking: the research agency often has to say no. The main reason: the requests are more often based ‘on a gut feeling rather than concrete indications’.

Last year that was 14 percent of the cases, now that has risen to 32 percent. Nieuwendijk adds: ,,A gut feeling alone is legally insufficient to be allowed to carry out an absenteeism check. We often discover that the employer does not have his absenteeism file in order. Then, for example, no occupational health and safety doctor is involved.

Nieuwendijk suspects that the gut feeling is related to the tight labor market and the high workload. The costs of absenteeism are high for employers. In addition, the outage causes more work pressure for colleagues. For example, if they come up with signals that the sick employee is not that sick at all and is working elsewhere, then you as an employer have to do something about it. Have a conversation with each other.”

Employers’ association AWVN does not have the impression that this is a concern among employers. “We do not have the impression that there is widespread fraud,” says spokesman Jannes van der Velde. He adds: “Relationships between employers and employees are determined by trust. This makes it possible, for example, to facilitate working from home.”

The CNV trade union does recognize the picture that Hoffmann paints. In a large-scale survey of 2,600 workers, 28 percent indicate that employers are increasingly using external agencies to ensure that people return to work quickly. ,,Forcing it leads to people being able to drop out for a long time in the long run”, warns Jolanda van Zwieten of CNV. “We understand that employers are up. But this attitude causes damage for both employee and employer. Only losers.”

As far as CNV is concerned, there is more focus on prevention. For example, 70 percent of employers would not take any measures to reduce work stress. Only 1 in 3 employers invest in a better working atmosphere to combat absenteeism. A majority of those surveyed are never asked what they need to continue to do their job in good health.

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