The Office of the Senate Chief Counsel for Employment (“SCCE”) submits the following comments to the Executive Director of the Office of Compliance (“OOC”) in response to the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“NPRM”), submitted by the Board of Directors (“Board”) of the OOC and published in the Congressional Record on September 16, 2015, 161 CONG. REC. S6704-64 (daily ed. Sept. 16, 20 15). The NPRM invites comments with respect to the proposed modifications to the current Regulations implementing the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (“FMLA”), as applied to covered employees of, inter alia, the Senate.
I. Issues of General Applicability
The proposed regulations use a numbering system that differs from that of the current OOC FMLA Regulations, but the NPRM does not indicate which of the current Regulations are being replaced. In order to avoid confusion, the section-by-section comments below are based on the numbering used in the proposed regulations set forth in the NPRM. Where SCCE believes that good cause exists to retain a section from the current Regulations, the numbering used in the current Regulations is used with a parenthetical indicating the source.
Additionally, the Board, in its preamble to the proposed regulations, has indicated that minor editorial changes and corrections have been made to the proposed regulations; however, the Board has not identified such editorial changes or corrections in its comments or in the proposed regulations themselves. The Board should clarify what it means by this statement and identify all editorial changes and corrections it intends to make.
