Dive Brief:
- New York City attempted to fire an employee for skipping work for 18 months only to discover he had died, the The New York Post reported. The city's Human Resources Administration accused Geoffrey Toliver of abandoning his job in November 2013.
- Toliver had worked as a Medicaid-eligibility specialist. Officials for the Human Resources Administration said after phone calls and letters to Toliver went unanswered for more than a year, they took steps to remove him from his $38,000 a year job, according to the Post.
- An administrative law judge recommended that Toliver be fired, saying he did not appear for his July 1 hearing. Toliver could not have attended the hearing; he had died of cancer on Dec. 8 at the age of 65. His death was reported in an online obituary.
Dive Insight:
“Some people he worked with were very supportive, so how did HRA the organization not know?” said Ted Willbright, who had considered Toliver as a brother, the New York Post reported. “He’s dead, and they’re saying he abandoned his job. He didn’t abandon his job, his job abandoned him. He was a good man. Truly, truly a good man.”
A spokesman for the Human Resources Administration told the AP that the agency is now aware of his “unfortunate death” and that it will not be taking further action. “We did everything we could to contact him and his family,” HRA spokesman David Neustadt told the NY Post. “This employee was not paid when he wasn’t working, but we left his job open in case he recovered.”
One needed action might be to determine how the HR agency's process for checking on missing employees might work more effectively. Most employers ask for emergency contacts as part of any employee's basic data. In this case, "everything we could" seemed to have fallen short based on comments from his family and friends.
