An employer may have wrongfully terminated an employee for exhausting her 12-week Family and Medical Leave Act entitlement, since by her definition of the 12-month benefit year, she had not used up all of her entitlement, according to a federal court decision in Michigan.

FMLA regulations require that the employer designate its 12-month benefit year in its leave policy, and to inform employees of the benefit period. The employer in this case failed to specify what its FMLA benefit year was in its handbook policy. When the employee took her leave starting in December, she was terminated in March after the employer calculated she had exhausted her 12 weeks of leave based on its fiscal year. The employee said the calculation should have been based on the calendar year, which meant that she had not yet exhausted her FMLA leave at the time of termination.

The court finds that the employer “had to explicitly state somewhere in its FMLA policy that it uses its fiscal year (July 1 through June 30) as the basis for calculating the leave year,” and that the selection had to be “open,” not “secret.” The court notes that the employer “apparently believes that its selection was ‘open’ where employees looking for information on the FMLA had to (1) read portions of the Handbook not pertaining to the FMLA and (2) assume that the fiscal year approach used in that section also applies to the calculation of the FMLA leave year.” Saying it was “unpersuaded” by that contention, the court says that the employee is entitled to use the calculation most beneficial to her. Spencer v. Marygrove College