The Interior Ministry Will Hunt Down Fake Sick Leave - and a Check Inside the Ministry Itself Found Irregularities in 29 of 80 Employees

The state is opening a hunt for fake sick leave, and the police are joining in. Interior Minister Pance Toskovski said there is "major abuse of sick leave" in both the public and private sectors, that the police will provide support, and that human rights will be respected in the process. Exactly how - he didn't say. When journalists asked him about the Health Insurance Fund's announcement of joint inspections with the Interior Ministry, he replied that he hadn't heard that statement.

The irony is in the numbers. The only concrete evidence of the scale of abuse that institutions have produced so far comes from the Interior Ministry itself. At the ministry's own request, the Health Insurance Fund checked 80 police employees with a total of 514 sick leave episodes in the second half of 2025. Irregularities were found in 29 of them. Of the 514 sick leaves, 100 had been issued improperly or carelessly. One employee changed their family doctor four times in a year and a half to string together consecutive sick leaves under different diagnoses.

What's changing

Fund director Zlatko Perinski announced that family doctors will be able to open sick leave on their own for up to five days, instead of the current seven. Anything longer will go through stricter electronic records and medical boards. Home-address checks have also been announced - following a report from an employer or at random. If the insured person isn't found at home, they will have to explain to a medical board where they were. The inspections will also be carried out in cooperation with the Public Revenue Office and the Interior Ministry.

Health Minister Saso Klekovski says there is "sick leave inflation", that some is issued over the phone and that five days is quite enough. "There are situations where people on sick leave post photos from a holiday in Italy on Instagram," he said, adding that the model had been compared with Slovenia's. But the same minister admitted that monitoring a sick person's movements is currently not regulated by law, and that a law is needed for it.

That is the key sentence in the whole story. Visits to sick people's homes are being announced, with the police as a partner, while the legal basis for monitoring their movements, by the minister's own admission, has yet to be created. Who will answer for it if an inspector knocks on the wrong door?

Who actually costs money

General practitioners oppose the cut to five days, because for many diagnoses it simply isn't enough. They also point out something obvious: a person on sick leave doesn't have to be at home all the time - they go to therapy or to check-ups.

Look at the Fund's own numbers, too. In August alone, 623.1 million denars were paid out in sick-leave-related benefits. Of that, 414 million was maternity leave - something nobody calls abuse. That leaves around 209 million for all other sick leave. Abuse should be cut, and the Interior Ministry example shows it exists. But when the measure boils down to five days for everyone and police at the door, the question is whether they're hunting cheats or frightening the sick.