What to Do When an FMLA Form Raises Questions

Here is a situation that comes up more often than most employers expect.

An employee turns in an FMLA medical certification. Something about it raises a question. Maybe the section meant for the doctor is filled out in what looks like the employee's handwriting. Maybe entries are blank, or the answers are too vague to tell whether the leave qualifies.

Now what? Can you contact the provider to verify the form? Or do you have to go back to the employee first?

A federal appeals court just addressed a version of that question, and the answer is more nuanced than the headlines suggest.

First, the Part Worth Saying Out Loud

The vast majority of certification problems are not anyone trying to pull something.

FMLA paperwork is genuinely confusing. Employees are often filling it out while a parent is in the hospital or while they are sick themselves. Doctors' offices are slow, sometimes weeks slow, and staff at those offices frequently hand the form back and tell the patient to complete what they can. Many employees have no idea that a specific section is legally reserved for the provider.

So when a form comes back with gaps or oddities, the honest starting assumption is confusion, not deception. That assumption should shape how you handle it, because how you respond to a paperwork problem is something your whole team will notice.

That said, you still need a process. Here is what the law says and what a court just clarified.

What the Court Decided

The case came out of Virginia. A city employee requested FMLA leave in 2021 to care for his mother. He submitted a certification on which he had completed the section designated for the medical provider, then obtained a nurse's signature.

The employer had questions about whether the provider knew what she was signing. Rather than going back to the employee first, the employer contacted the certifying provider directly to authenticate the document. The employee was later terminated, and he sued, arguing the employer interfered with his FMLA rights by contacting the provider before giving him a chance to correct the form.

The trial court sided with the employee, holding that federal regulations clearly established a right to a cure period before that contact.

On August 4, 2026, the Fourth Circuit reversed. According to the court, the regulations were not clear enough to place that right beyond debate, and a reasonable official could read them as not requiring a cure opportunity first.

What the Ruling Does Not Say

This is where coverage of the decision gets ahead of itself.

The case was decided on qualified immunity, which shields government officials from personal liability when the law was not clearly established at the time they acted. That was the entire basis of the ruling.

Two consequences follow:

It does not apply to private employers. If you run a business rather than a city department, qualified immunity is not available to you. This ruling gives you no defense.

The court did not say the cure requirement disappears. It said the regulations were ambiguous enough that an official could not be held personally liable for one reasonable reading of them in 2021. That is a long way from permission to skip a step.

What the Rules Actually Require

None of this changed the underlying regulations, which are worth knowing regardless.

Under 29 CFR 825.305, when a certification is incomplete or insufficient, the employer must tell the employee in writing exactly what is missing and give at least seven calendar days to fix it. A certification is incomplete when required entries are blank. It is insufficient when the information provided is vague, ambiguous, or non-responsive.

Authentication is a separate step. It means providing the health care provider with a copy of the certification and asking them to verify that the information was completed or authorized by the person who signed it. Authentication does not involve requesting any new medical information.

The unsettled question, and the reason this got litigated, is whether a form with authenticity concerns counts as insufficient and therefore triggers the cure requirement, or whether it is purely an authentication matter. The Fourth Circuit did not resolve that. It only held the answer was not obvious enough to remove an official's immunity.

Does This Apply in Michigan?

Not directly. The Fourth Circuit covers Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. Michigan is in the Sixth Circuit, which has not ruled on this question.

For Michigan employers, this is a signal about how courts are reasoning, not a rule you can lean on.

Also worth remembering: FMLA applies to private employers with 50 or more employees within a 75-mile radius. Plenty of small businesses are not covered at all. If you are under that threshold, treat this as background rather than an immediate concern.

The Process to Follow

Start with the employee. Put the issue in writing, be specific about what is missing or unclear, and give the seven days. Most of the time this resolves everything, because the gap was a misunderstanding about who fills out what.

Do not let it sit. A form you have questions about does not improve by being ignored. Address it promptly and document when you flagged it and why. Delay hurts both sides here, because the employee is waiting on an answer about leave they may badly need.

Know who makes the authentication call. Under FMLA rules, the employee's direct supervisor should not be the person contacting the health care provider. Route that through HR, a leave administrator, or another management official.

Stay in your lane during authentication. Authentication confirms the signature and completion of the form. It is not an opening to ask the provider about the underlying condition, the prognosis, or anything else.

Keep the leave question separate from any conduct question. If a review eventually turns up something more than a paperwork error, that is its own matter and deserves its own documented process. Do not collapse the two, and do not start there.

Apply the same process every time. Consistency is what makes any of this defensible. If one employee gets a cure period and another does not, the difference is what someone will point to later.

The Bottom Line

FMLA administration is one of those areas where the risk lives in procedural details almost nobody reads until they need them.

This ruling did not hand employers a shortcut. It highlighted that the rules around cure periods and authentication are ambiguous enough that thoughtful people read them differently, which is exactly the kind of gray area you would rather not be sorting out for the first time while an employee is out caring for a parent.

Build the process now, while nothing is urgent. Then follow it the same way for everyone.

AlphaDog HR Solutions helps businesses handle leave administration, documentation, and the compliance details that only become obvious after something goes wrong. If your FMLA process lives in someone's head instead of on paper, let's fix that.