Wet verbetering poortwachter: the reintegration timetable

It requires the employer and the employee to work at getting the employee back to work, on a timetable, and to write down what they did. The Act does not leave the effort to the employer’s judgement: it sets dated steps, names who produces each document, and ends with UWV reading the file and deciding whether the effort was good enough.

Two features make it unlike anything a foreign employer will have run before. The first is that the duty is shared. The employee has obligations too, and a reintegration file in which only one party appears is a weak file. The second is that the assessment happens at the end, by an outside body, against a record built over two years. There is no way to improve the file in week 100.

Money runs in parallel and is a separate subject: the employer pays 70% of wage for those 104 weeks under article 7:629 BW. The payment duty, the floors and the cap are set out in our post on Dutch sick pay rules. This post is about the process and the sanction, which is where the extra money is lost.

It also runs from the first day of the absence rather than from the moment it becomes obviously serious, which is the single most expensive misunderstanding in the whole area. Nobody knows in week one which absence will still be running in week fifty, so the only safe assumption is that every long absence started as an ordinary one that was handled properly.

The work is done with an arbodienst or a bedrijfsarts. The employer does not decide what the employee can do, and neither does the employee: the medical assessment of what work is still possible comes from the bedrijfsarts, and the employer builds the plan around it.

The first year has six fixed points, and five of them produce a document. UWV and Ondernemersplein publish the same timetable, so there is no ambiguity about what is due when.

• Day 1. The absence is reported to the arbodienst or the bedrijfsarts. The clock starts here, not when the absence begins to look long.
• Week 6. The bedrijfsarts produces the probleemanalyse: what the employee can still do, the prospects of recovery and the expected return.
• Week 8. Employer and employee draw up the plan van aanpak together, setting out the goal and the steps towards it.
• Every six weeks. A voortgangsgesprek, documented. The record of these meetings is a large part of what UWV eventually reads.
• Week 42. The 42e-weekmelding notifies UWV of the long-term sickness, due no later than the first working day after week 42.
• Week 52. The eerstejaarsevaluatie takes stock of the first year and adjusts the plan for the second.

Nothing in that list is onerous on its own. What makes it demanding is that it runs for two years, in parallel with the ordinary business of the team, for one person who is not there.

The dates are not aspirational. A probleemanalyse produced in week 12 because the employer expected a quick recovery is a gap in the file that cannot be closed later, and the week 42 notification is a hard deadline with a single working day of tolerance in its wording.

The eerstejaarsevaluatie is the point at which most files either turn or drift. A year of absence with a plan that still says the same thing it said in week 8 is the shape UWV reads as an employer that stopped trying.

The second year is shorter than it looks, because it ends with paperwork that has to be ready weeks before the 104 weeks are up.

In week 91 the eindevaluatie is drawn up: the closing assessment of the reintegration effort and where it got to. In week 93 the employee applies to UWV for WIA, the long-term incapacity benefit, and the re-integratieverslag has to be submitted within one day of that application. That file is the whole history: the probleemanalyse, the plan van aanpak, the progress records, the evaluations and the evidence of what was tried on each track. In week 104 the statutory wage continuation ends.

Counting backwards from week 93 is the single most useful planning habit an employer can adopt here. The file is assembled from documents that were supposed to exist already, so the quality of the week 93 submission was decided in weeks 6, 8 and 42. An employer starting to gather the record in week 90 is not preparing a claim; it is discovering what it failed to do.

The WIA application is the employee’s to make, but its timing is the employer’s problem too, because a late claim delays everything behind it and the reintegration file has to be complete when it goes in. This is one of several points where the two parties’ duties are interlocking rather than parallel, and where an employer that treats the absence as the employee’s business has misread the Act.

UWV publishes a step-by-step guide to employee sickness in English, which is the version worth putting in front of a foreign parent company that does not believe the timetable is real.

Reintegration runs on two tracks, and an employer is expected to work both where the first one is not going to succeed.

Spoor 1 is reintegration with the same employer: back into the original job, into that job adapted, or into another suitable role inside the business. It is the first thing tried and the thing every employer thinks of.

Spoor 2 is reintegration with another employer, usually with the help of a reintegration provider, while the employee stays contracted to the original employer. It is the part foreign employers do not expect, because it asks an employer to actively help its own employee find work somewhere else, and to pay for that help, while still paying their wages.

An employer that never opens spoor 2, or opens it too late, is the single most common reason for a loonsanctie. The mistake is rarely bad faith. It is optimism: the employer believes a return to the original role is still coming, keeps working spoor 1 alone, and cannot show UWV that it tested the alternative while there was still time to do anything with the answer.

At the end of the two years UWV assesses the re-integratieverslag. That assessment is the RIV-toets, and it is a judgement on the employer’s effort rather than on the employee’s health. An employee who was never going to recover does not make the file safe; an employer that tried everything and recorded it does.

Where UWV finds the effort insufficient, it orders the employer to continue paying wages for up to one further year, 52 weeks on top of the 104. That is the loonsanctie, and the worst case is 156 weeks, three years of pay, for an absence the employer did not cause and could not have prevented. UWV explains the test on its page about the assessment of the re-integratieverslag.

A sanction can be shortened. An employer that repairs what UWV found lacking can file a bekortingsverzoek, a request to cut the sanction short, and UWV decides within three weeks. That is a real route rather than a formality, but it only works where the gap was something that can still be repaired. A spoor 2 that should have started in month fourteen cannot be recreated in month twenty-seven.

There is a second cost inside the sanction that rarely gets budgeted. Shortening it means repairing the gap UWV identified, so the third year carries the wages, the employer charges on them and the cost of the reintegration work that should have happened earlier, all at once.

The cause of a loonsanctie is worth stating twice, because it is the part that surprises people. It is not the illness, its length or its outcome. It is the documented effort, judged against a timetable that was published in advance.

Because the dismissal prohibition extends with it. Article 7:670(1) BW prevents an employer from giving notice while an employee is unfit through illness, unless the incapacity has already lasted at least two years. Where a loonsanctie is imposed, that protection extends alongside it, so a third year of wages arrives with a third year in which the contract cannot be ended either.

That combination is the real exposure, and it is why the process is worth more attention than the payment. An employer facing a third year is paying for someone who is not working, is paying for the reintegration support, and has no exit available until the sanction runs out. Our post on terminating employment in the Netherlands covers what happens once the prohibition has lifted, and our comparison of US and Dutch termination rules explains why the whole shape is unfamiliar to a US buyer.

What a well-run file needs is unglamorous. An arbodienst engaged from day one rather than from week five. A probleemanalyse and a plan van aanpak on their dates. Voortgangsgesprekken that actually happen every six weeks and are written up. A serious, dated assessment of passende arbeid inside the business, and a spoor 2 opened while it can still lead somewhere. And one person whose job it is to hold the calendar, because the milestones do not announce themselves.

That is the work Employer of Record Netherlands carries as the employer on the contract: the arbodienst relationship, the milestone calendar, the documents on their dates and the file that UWV eventually reads. Your business keeps the role and the work, and gets told what is happening rather than discovering it in week 93.

Reintegration frequently means adapted duties or adapted hours before it means a different job, which is where an employee who already works partly from home raises different questions. Our post on remote work in the Netherlands sets out what Dutch law does and does not give an employee on where they work.