Instances of employee abuse of family and medical leave programs appear to be far less frequent than many employers might suspect, according to a study by the San Francisco-based Integrated Benefits Institute.

A common complaint among employers regarding the Family and Medical Leave Act is that employees often use the program to give themselves “long weekends” by requesting intermittent leave on Fridays and Mondays, according to IBI's study, “Early Warnings: Using FMLA to Understand and Manage Disability Absence.” The phenomenon has led many employers to derisively refer to the FMLA as the “Friday-Monday Leave Act,” the study noted.

However, IBI's survey of 161 employers — whose combined workforce totaled more than 520,000 — showed that employees were no more likely to request intermittent FMLA leave on Friday or Monday than on any other day of the work week. Of the more than 920,000 intermittent leave requests analyzed in the study, 19% were submitted on Monday and 17% were submitted on Friday, compared with 19%, 18% and 17% submitted on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, respectively.

The frequency of intermittent FMLA leave requests remained evenly distributed among weekdays when the data was analyzed according to the employees' industry, gender and other demographics, the study said.

“When we look at this data, we don't see an overwhelming pattern of abuse,” said IBI President Thomas Parry in an interview with Business Insurance. “That's not to say that instances of abuse don't occur at all. But we cut the data every way we could think of, because we kept hearing from employers that this Monday/Friday issue was a horrible problem that they were having, and we just can't find any evidence that says it's widespread.”

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Mr. Parry said the discrepancy between the perceived frequency of FMLA abuse shared by employers and the IBI study's findings could be explained by substantial extent to which even a few instances of FMLA abuse can negatively impact their business.

“In part, I think it's just human nature to identify and fixate on a few instances that really bother us,” Mr. Parry said. “It doesn't take too many employees abusing something like FMLA leave for it to start to impact other employees' morale and even their performance, so the issue becomes very real for employers.”

“We have to be careful not to define abuse too narrowly,” he added. “When something happens, however infrequently, it can have an effect on other employees and how they view their employer.”

The IBI study also analyzed the predictive relationship between requests for FMLA leave and claims for short- and long-term disability.

According to the report, employees who requested FMLA leave for an injury or illness were twice as likely to file a claim for short-term disability within a given calendar year. Employees who filed short-term disability claims to care for a sick or injured family member in a given year were 50% more likely to have requested a related FMLA leave of absence, the study found.

The study also showed that employees' short-term disability leave durations tended to be 5-8 days longer if the employee had filed a previous or concurrent FMLA leave request.

“There does seem to be a pattern here,” Brian Gifford, a senior research associate at IBI, said on Monday during a presentation at the Fifth Annual IBI/NBCH Health and Productivity Forum in Dallas. “The overall theme is that early information about one type of absence or leave can give you some insight into other incidents down the road.”