Management has approved the leave and employee does not have corresponding leave.

Even if management has approved the leave and employee does not have corresponding leave balance than ideally employee has to be on LOP only.
Please confirm on what basis we have paid to employee in this case

Dear Friend,
When the employee does not have a balance, then his leave is treated as LOP.

This is an incident indicative of lack of maintenance of leave accounts of employees by the establishment. Basically the term "leave" means leave of absence - that is the formal permission to be away from work at the request of the employee. Whether such a leave entitles an employee to wages/salary is a secondary issue depending on the type of leave, balance at credit, no. of days required etc. and mere sanction by inadvertance or otherwise can not favour an employee to claim leave salary. If there is no leave balance, as rightly observed by Ravi, it has to be treated as L.O.P only. However, if there is a provision for " Leave-not-due" type of leave in the Leave Rules of the organization, pay for the leave can be allowed in anticipation of adjustment against the leave to be earned subsequently.

Dear Friend,
You can sanction advance leave against his working during this current year instead of LOP. Take an application from the employee to this effect.

This is a clear case of LOP. In case you have provision for anticipatory credit this can be adjusted against the same.

There may be two types of leave - Authorized & Unauthorized. LOP is depend on balance of leave in the credit of the employee. It appears that it is Authorized LOP. There are occasions when employees may exhaust their leave but due to some unavoidable circumstances, the employee may required to take leave for genuine reason - Authorized LOP. Habitual absentee should be considered as Unauthorized LOP. For Unauthorized LOP it is better to initiate disciplinary action after proper counselling but for Authorized LOP it should not.
As Mr. Umakanthan has mentioned that lack of maintenance of leave record is also possible in the instant case.
Thanks & Regards,
S K Bandyopadhyay ( Howrah, WB)

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