At a prior employer of mine, you accrued 12 sick days per year, up to a maximum of 120 in your bucket at any given time. If you were ill, you were permitted to

At a prior employer of mine, you accrued 12 sick days per year, up to a maximum of 120 in your bucket at any given time. If you were ill, you were permitted to use as many of your accrued sick days as necessary. In any given calendar year you could take five sick days without any documentation, but the rest had to come with a note from a doctor indicating you were too ill to work. There was also a company policy that stupidly tried to incentivize attendance at work: if you used no sick days in a year, you would receive a "bonus" vacation day to use the following year. Setting aside how this incentivizes people to come into work when they're sick, it also set up an perverse incentive after an employee actually had to call in sick. Suppose you had to actually take a sick day due to illness. That day off cost you the free extra vacation day next year. Now you may as well just "call in sick" later in the year and exercise your remaining un-validated sick days.