Imagine being away from your job for months on end without anyone checking up on you. That's what was happening at the City of Winnipeg's Fire Department.

Consider the following snip-it from a July 2009 City of Winnipeg audit report (see executive policy iten number #8 here) on firefighters' sick leave:

"Currently, if an employee is off sick, their name is placed on an "off-duty list" and the employee will be contacted when deemed necessary by a Platoon Chief or higher level. There is no mechanism to record the employee's expected return to work date or to prompt a follow-up action. We found in several cases where months had gone by before there was any documented follow-up action. We also found in several cases where a doctor had specified an expected date that the employee would return to work and a number of weeks or months could pass without the WFPS following up on why the employee had not returned to work."

Looks like the audit wasn't talking about a couple dollars here and there either. Consider this comment by the City's Auditor:

"In our 2007 sample, we found that adequate medical documentation, as prescribed above, was on file only 15% of the time. We found some written form of acknowledgement for the employee's absence about 35% of the time, and insufficient documentation for the absence was noted in approximately 50% of the cases. This translated to sick leave payments when there was insufficient medical documentation in our sample of approximately $371,000 in 2007"

So what was the result of this clear lack of accountability? Ho hum, nothing. After reviewing the report, the CTF contacted the auditor and asked if there were any pay cuts or repercussions to staff for the debacle. Disappointingly, the answer was "no".

Fortunately, after the 2007 results started to come in, greater monitoring of sick leave occurred and the number of employees with 500 hours of sick leave fell from 21 to 10. Go figure.